Shioiri Itsuzo was a rather quirky professional who will be known to readers of 9-dan Showdown as the young scorekeeper who spotted a tesuji that both Go Seigen and Fujisawa Kuranosuke missed in their 1951 ten-game match.

He was often rather blunt, though not in a malicious way, and several times wrote features in Kido that elicited long and irate responses. These were the days when go editors had cojones, and quite a few personality clashes were played out in letters to magazines. Fujisawa himself was one such letter writer, having a go at Go akong others.

The following is a sample of Shiori's splendid work: "On tsumego – a proposal to the go world", published in Kido in the late 1950s. It is about half the feature. The rest will appear on the Winter 2011 edition of the GoGoD CD (yes we have only just published a new summer issue, but we never stop adding.) It is enough to show Shioiri's temperament. In the portion missing here he goes on to lambast people over hints on problems and gives his (surprising) list of the best tsumego composers, which includes tearing a strip off the Honinbo.

If you are one of those who believe go pros can memorise all their games, know every joseki and generally walk on water, you will possibly be disappointed to learn they can have feet of clay. But there are insights in to the pro world here that you will not have seen elsewhere, and some of us enjoy them.

Sadly, Shioiri was one of those whom "the gods loved". He died just a few years after this piece, aged just 40, his early career having been hampered by a long illness.

Last year I wrote something “On tsumego” in the go journal Igo no Tomo, but there have been rather too many problematical points lately and so I feel I ought to write again.

Thanks to the growth of go recently, go columns of one sort or another have become established in newspapers, monthly magazines and weekly magazines, but because of lack of space the most usual format appears to be a tsumego, and this is almost invariably what the monthly and weekly magazines publish. This means an awful lot of expenditure on tsumego every month. I have not tried to discover exact figures, and so I can’t be sure, but it seems likely that, overall, about 500 tsumego problems a month are being ingested. It might seem inconceivable to have as many as 500, but if we just do a rough calculation, around seven specialist go magazines have an average of two each. That makes fourteen. The weekly magazines I am familiar with – Shukan Asahi, Myojo, Taishu, Shincho, Yomiuri, Tokyo, Sankei, Sunday Mainichi, Asahi Geino – account, the nine of them, for 36 problems. There are probably something like twenty monthly magazines, from Sogo Zasshi to Kodan Club. Assuming an average of one tsumego each, that makes twenty problems. In addition there are the various job or staff magazines, of which there are a considerable number. Hashimoto Utaro 9-dan of the Kansai Ki-in publishes a tsumego every day in the Osaka newspapers and so on. That makes about sixty a month. Shimamura Toshihiro 8-dan also publishes a tsumego every day, and if you put these and others all together that should comfortably make around 500. Because these are tsumego problems mass-produced every month, it is inevitable that they will be a mixture of jewels and grit. It would seem that rather many of the recent tsumego problems have raised issues. In fact, rather than the tsumego problems themselves being an issue, it is the professionals who produce the tsumego problems.

The first issue is that of producing “new” tsumego problems which everyone knows have appeared in Gokyo Shumyo and so on. Because the editors of magazines know nothing about old problems which have appeared in books of long ago, they believe they are “new problems” by a professional whom they trust, and so they pay a considerable fee for them. Surely this is no more than fraud. With a little bit more scruple, it is possible more or less to keep the theme and change the shapes, but then there are magazines that brazenly publish, exactly as they are problems, that have appeared in books.

The second issue is selling a composition by another person as a new problem under your own name. There are, of course coincidences, but coincidence cannot be an excuse in the case of a special theme. There was a good example the other day. A certain newspaper published a tsumego by a certain 9-dan. This problem was a painstaking composition by Ide Yaojiro 4-dan, published two or three months ago in Kido. It was clearly not a coincidence. This certain 9-dan apparently said he was unaware of it because he had not looked at Kido, but a coincidence based on the idea that a professional of the Nihon Ki-in did not look at Kido, the official organ of the Ki-in, does not wash. There are certain writers who simply harvest quality tsumego problems by other people and publish them in weekly magazines. This is obviously plagiarism, and the creator of the tsumego is the one who suffers. If people use tsumego problems by other people, I believe they should be honourable enough to record the name of the composer and to pay a creation fee out of their manuscript fee.

The third issue is selling the same work in two places simultaneously. Obviously this too is something that shouldn’t happen. (Actually, even I was guilty of this last year. I didn’t have the slightest intention of selling to two places, but by mistake the tsumego was published into two places. The magazines were understanding when I explained the circumstances to them, but it caused bewilderment for the readers.) Even if there is no wicked intent, publishing a single composition in two places is something for which the perpetrator should be upbraided, but among us there clearly are those who do use one composition twice. I would urge them to pay attention and show some scruples. (I too will take great care from now on.)

The fourth issue is to do with the form of the tsumego. What I mean by this is something that is labelled a tsumego when it is not a tsumego. For example, in shogi, a king on the back rank with a pawn one square in front of it and a gold in hand, where the right answer is to drop the gold at the head of the king, can hardly be called a tsume-shogi problem. The same thing applies to tsumego. If the right answer is a move anyone can see instantly, it cannot be called a tsumego. If there is also a hint as well, it goes beyond the laughable to being infuriating. Newspaper companies apparently like compositions that are as easy as possible so that they get many responses, but it should not mean that a tsumego cannot be considered just because the number of replies will be small. If it is a good composition it will be doubly welcomed, both when it is first published and when the solution is given. Newspapers that fall into the trap of thinking only about the size of the response ought perhaps to reconsider. Also, if a professional is asked to produce a problem, offering a problem that is so easily made says something about the scruples of that professional.

Fifth on the list are problems with mistakes. In a sense these often cannot be avoided altogether, and so it is not a major fault, but the mistakes can be minimised by adequate scrutiny and by showing the composition to as many professionals as possible before it is published.

If we consider why these various issues arise, it seems in the first instance that a major factor is that there are no regulations governing tsumego problems. I believe regulations should be drawn up quickly, but it seems unlikely that this will happen with any great despatch, and it may even give rise to difficulties. It is a troublesome issue, but if professionals act scrupulously with each other, not too many difficulties should arise. As a practical way of resolving them, Kido and Igo Shincho (the Kansai Ki-in organ) could be the driving forces, and they and other specialist go magazines could handle the bulk of tsumego problems. I don’t know much about Igo Shincho, but the fact that composition fees for tsumego in specialist go magazines are at present too low is, I believe, one impediment. In the case of Kido what I would hope for is that it would pay higher fees for better compositions. Then Kido would have the rights to all the tsumego on behalf of the Nihon Ki-in professionals. If requests from newspaper companies and magazines then went through Kido, plagiarism and wilfully using other peoples’ work would no longer be a problem.

The problems published by Kido should have at the minimum a higher fee than that paid by a newspaper or magazine company. If fees were divided into, say, three classes going up threefold, professionals would probably try their hardest to produce good tsumego problems. The present situation is that the fees paid by Kido and the specialist go magazines are the lowest, and so the famous players from the Honinbo downwards are simply publishing their compositions, whatever they are, in other magazines where they can sell them at a higher price, and so their names hardly ever appear in such an important magazine as Kido. The only person who has a foot in both camps appears to be Maeda Nobuaki 8-dan. Fujisawa Hideyuki 7-dan and others have a supply of superior compositions but they say they are not inclined to publish them because the rates are too low. Sugiuchi Masao 8-dan is likewise not inclined to publish for low rates, and has said that if rates were higher he would try to produce better problems. Fujisawa has said the same thing and has said that Kido ought, once a year, to run a tsumego competition. If the first prize was of the order of 100,000 yen [the swishest television set was then selling for 70,000 yen], composers would be vying with each other to produce the best problems. I think this is most definitely a good idea. Either way, Kido investing great effort in tsumego is the key point, not the actual tsumego.

A tsumego competition sounds like a lot of fun. There could even be categories, like theme, difficulty, uniqueness, etc.

Regarding composing tsumego, what type of differences are seen in terms of the higher quality well-composed problems produced in Japan vs. Korea vs. China? Are there certain traits that differentiate the types of masterpiece problems composed by authors of each country? Are there differences we can see in how tsumego have changed over time such as from ancient go history to contemporary times? For example, I do see many ancient Chinese go manuals with fancy names associated with given tsumego problems whereas in modern times, it is very rare to find such descriptions.

Tsumego is such a fascinating topic and such an important part of training for improvement, finding out more about the stories behind it is so interesting. Thank you for your article and I look forward to reading the rest of it in Winter 2011 GoGOD later on.

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Go is such a beautiful game.

When he writes this about professional created tsumego / collections, what would he have said about our amateur undertakings, here, at SL, at GoProblems?

I don't think you need to assume that Shioiri's opinion of amateurs creating tsumego would necessarily be even worse. A lot of his criticism was about ethical standards. That has very little to do with your actual playing strength. Since pro's have to live from go, while amateurs have other sources of income, it makes sense that unethical behaviour like this would be more widespread among pro's. In other words, since the occasional go problem published here or on GD is not intended to earn its creator a (hefty) fee, these criticisms mostly don't apply to amateur go.