Go Reviews

Go as Communication
by Yasuda Yasutoshi 9-dan
Slate & Shell
Reviewed by Simon Goss
March 31, 2003

"Am I the only one who feels that people, children and adults alike, look tired?" So writes Yasuda Yasutoshi 9-dan in the preface to Go as Communication. Yasuda's attention had been caught by a news report of the suicide of a bullied school child, and he had become "... obsessed by the notion that I had to do something about the social problem in addition to simply popularizing Go." The first part of Go as Communication describes Yasuda's visits to kindergartens, schools, homes for the mentally disabled, day care centres for the elderly and a school for the deaf. Almost all those he writes about have some kind of difficulty communicating with others. Many are, to a greater or lesser extent, socially excluded as a result. In the second part of the book, Yasuda gives advice on how to teach go to children of different ages in large groups, and how to teach it in the other kinds of institution he has visited. Part three gives a brief account of similar work that has been done in the Netherlands, Romania, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and the USA. Yasuda is well known as the inventor of Capture Go, and what he says about it came as a bit of a surprise to me at first. I had always been led to believe that Yasuda's main aim was to popularise go, and that beginning with Capture Go was basically a technique to lead people to it gently. Nothing could be further from the truth. "Popularizing Go" is a phrase that is used occasionally in the book, but it isn't the objective. Yasuda states his objective in terms such as "help change society" and "do something about the social problem". He teaches Capture Go as a game in its own right. He recognizes that a few people will move on to regular go, but doesn't get excited about it. If most people stick with Capture Go and enjoy it, that's fine with him. Indeed, he explains that some of the mentally handicapped people he meets will probably never understand even the capture rule, but will anyway enjoy and benefit from the even simpler game of just placing go stones on intersections, and that's just fine too. Will this book do anything for you? Well, if you want to improve at tesuji or joseki, definitely not. It contains a basic explanation of the capture rule, but if you're any stronger than 36-kyu it will teach you nothing at all about the game. If you want to teach go to bright people who are able and willing to give you ten minutes of their attention, it may not help you much either. If you want to teach go to large groups of people with low or mixed abilities and/or motivation, then it will certainly give you food for thought and may even help you. But the people I'd really like to see reading this book aren't go players at all, but school teachers and care workers. If you can think of a person like that to whom you could give a copy of this book, I think you'd be doing them, and go, a huge service. (A longer version of this review originally appeared in the British Go Journal, #129, Winter 2002)

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