THE GAME OF GO
THE NATIONAL GAME OF JAPAN
BY
ARTHUR SMITH
圍碁
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1908
PREFACE
This book is intended as a practical guide to the game of Go. It is
especially designed to assist students of the game who have acquired a
smattering of it in some way and who wish to investigate it further at
their leisure.
As far as I know there is no work in the English language on the game
of Go as played in Japan. There is an article on the Chinese game by Z.
Volpicelli, in Vol. XXVI of the “Journal of the China Branch of the
Royal Asiatic Society.” This article I have not consulted. There is
also a short description of the Japanese game in a work on “Korean
Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan,” by
Stewart Culin, but this description would be of little practical use in
learning to play the game.
There is, however, an exhaustive treatise on the game in German by O.
Korschelt. This can be found in Parts 21–24 of the “Mittheilungen der
deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens.” The
student could readily learn the game from Herr Korschelt’s article if
it were available, but his work has not been translated, and it is
obtainable only in a few libraries in this country. In the preparation
of this book I have borrowed freely from Herr Korschelt’s work,
especially in the chapter devoted to the history of the game, and I
have also adopted many of his illustrative games and problems.
Herr Korschelt was an excellent player, and acquired his knowledge of
the game from Murase Shuho, who was the best player in Japan at the
time his article was written (about 1880).
My acquaintance with the game has been acquired from Mr. Mokichi
Nakamura, a Japanese resident of this country, who is an excellent
player, and whose enthusiasm for the game led me to attempt this book.
Mr. Nakamura has also supplied much of the material which I have used
in it. Toward the end I have had the expert assistance of Mr. Jihei
Hashiguchi, with whom readers of the New York Sun are already
acquainted.
Wherever possible I have given the Japanese words and phrases which are
used in playing the game, and for those who are not familiar with the
system of writing Japanese with Roman characters, I may say that the
consonants have the sounds used in English, and the vowels the sounds
that are used in Italian, all the final vowels being sounded. Thus,
“dame” is pronounced as though spelled “dahmay.”
New York, April, 1908.
INTRODUCTION
The game of Go belongs to the class of games of which our Chess, though
very dissimilar, is an example. It is played on a board, and is a game
of pure skill, into which the element of chance does not enter;
moreover, it is an exceedingly difficult game to learn, and no one can
expect to acquire the most superficial knowledge of it without many
hours of hard work. It is said in Japan that a player with ordinary
aptitude for the game would have to play ten thousand games in order to
attain professional rank of the lowest degree. When we think that it
would take twenty-seven years to play ten thousand games at the rate of
one game per day, we can get some idea of the Japanese estimate of its
difficulty. The difficulty of the game and the remarkable amount of
time and labor which it is necessary to expend in order to become even
a moderately good player, are the reasons why Go has not spread to
other countries since Japan has been opened to foreign intercourse. For
the same reasons few foreigners who live there have become familiar
with it.
On the other hand, its intense interest is attested by the following
saying of the Japanese: “Go uchi wa oya no shini me ni mo awanu,” which
means that a man playing the game would not leave off even to be
present at the death-bed of a parent. I have found that beginners in
this country to whom I have shown the game always seem to find it
interesting, although so far I have known no one who has progressed
beyond the novice stage. The more it is played the more its beauties
and opportunities for skill become apparent, and it may be
unhesitatingly recommended to that part of the community, however small
it may be, for whom games requiring skill and patience have an
attraction.
It is natural to compare it with our Chess, and it may safely be said
that Go has nothing to fear from the comparison. Indeed, it is not too
much to say that it presents even greater opportunities for foresight
and keen analysis.
The Japanese also play Chess, which they call “Shogi,” but it is
slightly different from our Chess, and their game has not been so well
developed.
Go, on the other hand, has been zealously played and scientifically
developed for centuries, and as will appear more at length in the
chapter on the History of the Game, it has, during part of this time,
been recognized and fostered by the government. Until recently a
systematic treatment of the game, such as we are accustomed to in our
books on Chess, has been lacking in Japan. A copious literature had
been produced, but it consisted mostly of collections of illustrative
and annotated games, and the Go masters seem to have had a desire to
make their marginal annotations as brief as possible, in order to
compel the beginner to go to the master for instruction and to learn
the game only by hard practice.
Chess and Go are both in a sense military games, but the military
tactics that are represented in Chess are of a past age, in which the
king himself entered the conflict—his fall generally meaning the loss
of the battle—and in which the victory or defeat was brought about by
the courage of single noblemen rather than through the fighting of the
common soldiers.
Go, on the other hand, is not merely a picture of a single battle like
Chess, but of a whole campaign of a modern kind, in which the
strategical movements of the masses in the end decide the victory.
Battles occur in various parts of the board, and sometimes several are
going on at the same time. Strong positions are besieged and captured,
and whole armies are cut off from their line of communications and are
taken prisoners unless they can fortify themselves in impregnable
positions, and a far-reaching strategy alone assures the victory.
It is difficult to say which of the two games gives more pleasure. The
combinations in Go suffer in comparison with those of Chess by reason
of a certain monotony, because there are no pieces having different
movements, and because the stones are not moved again after once being
placed on the board. Also to a beginner the play, especially in the
beginning of the game, seems vague; there are so many points on which
the stones may be played, and the amount of territory obtainable by one
move or the other seems hopelessly indefinite. This objection is more
apparent than real, and as one’s knowledge of the game grows, it
becomes apparent that the first stones must be played with great care,
and that there are certain definite, advantageous positions, which
limit the player in his choice of moves, just as the recognized Chess
openings guide our play in that game. Stones so played in the opening
are called “Joseki” by the Japanese. Nevertheless, I think that in the
early part of the game the play is somewhat indefinite for any player
of ordinary skill. On the other hand, these considerations are balanced
by the greater number of combinations and by the greater number of
places on the board where conflicts take place. As a rule it may be
said that two average players of about equal strength will find more
pleasure in Go than in Chess, for in Chess it is almost certain that
the first of two such players who loses a piece will lose the game, and
further play is mostly an unsuccessful struggle against certain defeat.
In Go, on the other hand, a severe loss does not by any means entail
the loss of the game, for the player temporarily worsted can betake
himself to another portion of the field where, for the most part
unaffected by the reverse already suffered, he may gain a compensating
advantage.
A peculiar charm of Go lies in the fact that through the so-called “Ko”
an apparently severe loss may often be made a means of securing a
decisive advantage in another portion of the board. A game is so much
the more interesting the oftener the opportunities for victory or
defeat change, and in Chess these chances do not change often, seldom
more than twice. In Go, on the other hand, they change much more
frequently, and sometimes just at the end of the game, perhaps in the
last moments, an almost certain defeat may by some clever move be
changed into a victory.
There is another respect in which Go is distinctly superior to Chess.
That is in the system of handicapping. When handicaps are given in
Chess, the whole opening is more or less spoiled, and the scale of
handicaps, from the Bishop’s Pawn to Queen’s Rook, is not very
accurate; and in one variation of the Muzio gambit, so far from being a
handicap, it is really an advantage to the first player to give up the
Queen’s Knight. In Go, on the other hand, the handicaps are in a
progressive scale of great accuracy, they have been given from the
earliest times, and the openings with handicaps have been studied quite
as much as those without handicaps.
In regard to the time required to play a game of Go, it may be said
that ordinary players finish a game in an hour or two, but as in Chess,
a championship game may be continued through several sittings, and may
last eight or ten hours. There is on record, however, an authentic
account of a game that was played for the championship at Yeddo during
the Shogunate, which lasted continuously nine days and one night.
Before taking up a description of the board and stones and the rules of
play, we will first outline a history of the game.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction vii
CHAPTER I
History of the Game 1