Heather Wonder, one of the members of the Mountain Go Club in Hamilton, Ontario, made this go
themed cake. “It was made to celebrate the one year anniversary of our growing club,” reports Nick Prince.
Google Site Search:
Go Photo: Hamilton Go Club Takes the Cake
December 5, 2011
Allen Posts ’11 Go Congress Photos
November 13, 2011
American Go E-Journal photographer Brian Allen has posted photos from this year’s U.S. Congress online. In addition to 
general photos of the 2011 Go Congress in Santa Barbara, CA, there are albums of the Youth Awards and the Korean Baduk Association awards. There’s also a nice album of Allen’s shots from the 2008 U.S. Go Congress in Portland, Oregon. Allen, who also manages the Seattle Go Center, is a professional photographer, so please be sure to carefully observe his restrictions/permissions on use of his images.
photo by Brian Allen
GO PHOTO: Chengdu Park, Sichuan Province
October 29, 2011
Zhiping You sent along this photo, “taken in my hometown, Chengdu, capital city of Sichuan province. I didn’t take it 
personally, I got it from an article about home trip experience. The picture is a random photo in a park. Interestingly, many people in the picture are playing go (WeiQi). This shows how popular this game is in Chengdu. If go had this kind of popularity in the US, it would be great, wouldn’t it?”
Traveling Board: Ed Lee & Jennie Shen Drop by the Nihon Kiin
October 28, 2011
Ed Lee and Jennie Shen 2P stopped by the Nihon Kiin in Tokyo during a recent visit to Japan. “Yoda Norimoto 9P was 
playing in the Yuugen no Ma on the 5th floor, Kobayashi Kouichi 9P was on the 7th floor and we also ran into Michael Redmond 9P in the hallway,” Lee reports. “Jennie and I accidentally found quite a few go clubs,” during the two-week group tour October 2 – 16, with Lee’s karate sensei, “related to the 80th anniversary of Waseda University’s karate club.” Click here to see more of Lee’s photos.
Go Photo: One Final Game
October 22, 2011
Two friends play one final game while awaiting internment, in San Francisco, California, in early 1942. From The
Atlantic’s August 21 photo essay “World War II: Internment of Japanese Americans,” part of a weekly retrospective of World War II. Thanks to Steve Colburn for passing this along.
GO SPOTTING: Star Trek
August 14, 2011
Go makes an appearance in Season 2 Episode 22 of Star Trek Enterprise, reports EJ reader Michael Rhone. In this episode, “Enterprise 
encounters the Vissians, a more technologically advanced species, and Trip finds himself transfixed on the fact the Vissians are a three-sexed species, befriending one of them with tragic results.”
GO PHOTO: Go In Old Japan
July 17, 2011
Some fascinating photos of go in old Japan have been posted on Flickr, including two geishas playing go, children learning the 
game, a Shinto priest and an actor playing, a master teaching two geisha and two samurai playing. The photos were posted by Okinawa Soba, a permanent resident of Japan. “I really can’t stand the captions and descriptions on this guy’s Flickr stream (many are insensitive at best, racist at worst, and a lot of sleazy sexual speculation),” notes Xeni Jardin on boingboing “but the images are rare and fantastic.”
GO PHOTO: Go Gnomes
July 17, 2011
E-Journal reader Eric Moakley recently spotted these go playing lawn gnomes in a Rite-Aid in Boulder CO. “Though no one in the store
knew the game, I was happy to see go out of a normal context, says Moakley.
Mind GO Club Celebrates Tanabata with Festival in Holon, Israel
July 16, 2011
On July 7, which is the Japanese Valentine’s day, or Tanabata, a festival of Japanese arts was held at the Mediateque, next to the art museum in Holon, Israel. Following last year’s success, a long row of tables was secured for the go demonstrations in the lobby. Mind GO’s team was ready to service all interested with boards, guidance, and pamphlets. We prepared go bookmarks as a giveaway that were as popular as fresh rolls. 
We had several hundred people coming to learn and play go, and for more than five hours, we could not enjoy a second of rest.
The festival, which was hosted by Holon’s municipality and supported by the Japanese embassy, had a selection of simultaneous events: go, calligraphy, origami, an embassy stand, ikebana (for the first time), tea ceremony, koto playing, story telling, a movie, karate demonstrations, and a selection of impressive art posters made to show the tsunami’s impact. In addition, Professor Ben Ami Shiloni gave a very interesting lecture about “Love and Erotics” in Japanese culture and later signed his new book. All in all this happening was a great success with a huge attendance. A selection of photos can be found here. On a personal note, it was fun when the mothers, impressed by the silence and concentrations of their kids, asked for a whole summer course of go for the kids to spend with us.
- Shavit Fragman, Mind GO Go Club
GO SPOTTING: David Mitchell’s Novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
July 3, 2011
If you need another reason to read David Mitchell’s spellbinding new novel The Thousand 
Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the game of go plays a key and major role in the story. Indeed, one entire section of the book is entitled “The Master of Go” and not only does go strategy drive part of the novel’s structure, but the game itself — in fact, a specific game, the board and pieces — play a dramatic role at the climax of the riveting novel. Thousand Autumns is more than just a terrific read, though. Mitchell has “meticulously reconstructed the lost world of Edo-era Japan, and in doing so he’s created his most conventional but most emotionally engaging novel yet,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Set in atmospheric coastal Japan, this epic story centers on an earnest young Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, who arrives in the summer of 1799 to make his fortune and return to Holland to wed his fiancée. But Jacob’s plans are shaken when he meets the daughter of a Samurai. Thousand Autumns is now out in paperback, as well as available as an e-book.