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The Go Player's Guide The Go Player's Guide to Japan: Snow, Moon and Flower Andou Tadashi's calloused hands are as sensitive as a surgeon's. For the last forty years the master craftsman has hand-shaped go stones in Hyuga City in Miyzaki Prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu. The famed Hyuga clamshells that yield top-grade go stones prized for their fine grain and warm glow are now as rare as the old-growth kaya trees in Miyzaki Prefecture's nearby Aya Forestry Reserve, where go-board maker Kenichi Kumasu (who I wrote about last time) gets his wood. Just 1% of white go stones come from Hyuga, where go stone factories like Kuroki Goishiten, which I visited last November, now must employ ships to search ever farther offshore and deeper into the waters of the Kuroshio current where the exceptional hamaguri clams grow shells thick and lustrous. While most clamshell stones now come from Mexico (although, as in Japan, over-fishing is now threatening the supply there as well) and are machine-made, Hyuga clamshells must be hand-crafted because they lack the sensitivity and finesse of the human hand. "A half-millimeter difference can cut the value of a stone by 50%," Kuroki Goishiten President Hirotaka Kuroki told me as we watched Andou Tadashi expertly polish a clamshell "slug" on a whetstone. The shell stones begin their new life as go stones as unremarkable round disks chiseled from the thickest part of an ordinary-looking clamshell. The edges are roughly ground down before coming to a craftsman like Tadashi, who uses fingers and eyes trained by a lifetime of experience to quickly but carefully polish each piece of shell to a uniform thickness, using simple hand-tools that haven't changed in generations. Shell stones are graded by the quality and thickness of the piece: Hyuga comes in three grades, from 'snow,' the highest, to 'moon' and 'flower,' in descending order. The grain in the snow stone is straight and fine, curved and coarser in moon and almost invisible in the flower grade. The thickest stones with the straightest grain are the rarest and thus most valuable: not only are there few hamaguri clams left, but it takes 15 years for them to grow shells thick enough for the best stones, which can command over a hundred thousand yen for a set. In the showroom after the workshop tour, I was permitted to handle a top-grade set of "snow" stones on a professional-level Miyazaki kaya. The shell stones were indeed remarkable, the straight, true grain shimmering in the light and the thick stones amazingly light yet powerful in my hand. They were cool to the touch and yet at the same time they warmed instantly in my hand. The top-grade slate stones, jet black and cool as a cellar, still come from Kumano City near Osaka. The sound both made when placed on the kaya board was authoritative and resonant, and the stunning combination of glowing golden wood, clear-grained shell and crisp slate made it clearer than ever that the beauty of go is as much pure aesthetic pleasure as it is intellectual challenge. |
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Copyright © 2003 American Go Association Email the AGA at aga@usgo.org Email the Journal Team at journal@usgo.org Last updated on Sept 2, 2003 |