I have included this item under Professionals more in hope than expectation, but....
12-year-old Iwasaki Haruto has just (April 2021) joined the insei league in the Nihon Ki-in's Tokyo branch. He is one of a handful of budding new pros who enter the league at the very bottom of Division D. Success means climbing over 50-odd other inseis to reach the top three in Division A who make it to the big leagues, once each year. That is a truly tough order for any insei. For Haruto it is a little tougher. He is almost totally blind.
I have taken a special interest in blind players over the years, not just out of admiration. More out of inspiration. I had a work colleague, Brian, who was almost totally blind, too. But he could make out printed letters if they were magnified about 1,000 times. Our employer nobly had a machine specially made, with the result that Brian could add to his skills as an audio typist, laboriously checking his typed results.
But that was far from the highlight of Brian's achievements. For a time I thought that was his award for representing Britain in a skiing competition. I accompanied him to the award ceremony at a local ski slope. Just standing at the top made me feel giddy. Brian went whizzing down with an instructor behind him shouting left, right or whatever. But that was peanuts. Brian had done the same thing on a real piste in the Alps.
Even that was not his highlight. At the time, there was some industrial action which meant bus drivers went on strike. We all assumed we wouldn't see Brian at work that day. But he turned up, only a fraction late. We all joked he must be knackered after walking all the way (without thinking that he couldn't know the way). But he just said, "No, I came on my bike." We waited for the punchline. None came. Gently probing elicited that "nobody is going to stop me coming to work!" He had basically followed the bus route (several miles) and trusted commuters to help him out. Strictly, he should have been arrested. We were in awe of the world's biggest idiot. It was only later that the penny dropped in my brain - he's blind and he owns a bike!? On top of that it turned out it was a racing bike. I found out later that he raced the same way he skied - listening to companions shouting out instructions. Or tax-drivers bawling abuse on that particular day.
As I say, inspiration. I therefore homed in on the first blind go player I met, Song Chung-t'aek, a Korean amateur 5-dan. That was at the European Congress in Prague in 2005. I met him again a few years later in Korea. There was a considerable difference between the two occasions, in that in the Korean event he had a much better board. It seems his achievements had likewise inspired other people, and huge efforts had been put into improving boards for blind players. These are still going on. The board young Iwasaki Haruto plays on is basically the same type that debuted in Prague - plastic stones grooved underneath so that they can clamp onto raised board lines. The black and white stones (plastics?
) are differentiated by colour, of course, but also by one colour having a little knob on top. The blind players analyse the position by feeling the board with their fingers. They also have to train their memories superlatively.
To sighted players the boards look normal enough, if slightly toyshop-ish. But a major problem with these boards is that the blind player, like Zatoichi with his special sword, has to take his with him everywhere as clubs don't usually have them. They are bulky and awkward to carry. The latest design enhancement has been to make boards that come apart into four separate pieces. As you would expect, they have to be made with great precision, and tooling up a factory to make them is horrendously expensive in relation to the number of sales that can be expected.
Apart from Song, the most notable blind player I know of is the Japanese player Kakijima "Kakki" Mitsuharu. He is amateur 4-dan, but is now over 40 and spends most of his go time encouraging other blind players, especially in schools.
Haruto took a slightly different route (for one thing he is in Saitama City. Kakki is in Machida, Tokyo). His introduction to go came through the fact that his grandfather owns a building which he rents out to a go club.
Haruto had been blind since falling in with lymphoblastic leukaemia at age one. The usual treatments did not save him. The last-gasp treatment that save his life, but not his vision, was a stem-cell transplant from umbilical cord blood. He had to go to a special blind school and that is where he started playing go, attracted to it because of the connection with his grandfather's rent-out. He was about six. Like most 6-year-olds he adored Thomas the Tank Engine (as I did at 6), but go had even more pulling power.
Three years later, as nominally amateur 1-dan, he joined a local club run by a strong amateur 6-dan Sogabe Toshiyuki. Sogabe gave him special attention, and arranged games with a pro, Mizuma Toshifumi 8-dan. At first Mizuma was able to beat the youngster down from five to seven stones. But Haruto zoomed up to 6-dan in about seven months. This led to an introduction to pro 6-dan Nobuta Shigehito (around 70 now, but he was once a pupil in the Kitani school). Sogabe and Nobuta were internet buddies on the Yugen no Ma server. Haruto also plays there but, like my friend Brian, has to operate with his face almost touching a magnified display on the computer screen.
Nobuta noted the combination of talent and intense concentration in Haruto, and that led him to suggest trying out as an insei. He is the first blind insei. not surprisingly. And the journey only starts here. He will need to have, at long last, some luck on the way. For example, Tanaka Tetsuji is now President of the Japanese Braille Library. He recalled that when he was young, and partially blind, he too tried to devote his life to go but had to give up after three years because his vision deteriorated and eventually he couldn't make out the black stones.
Nevertheless, the modern blind boards have transformed the scene. They are called 愛碁 Aigo, which I think is a nickname rather than a trade name. Aigo means, more or less, "I love go" but is obviously also a pun on Eye-go. Nowadays, you might want to discern another possible pun with AI. I hope not. I prefer to see Haruto's talent as HI - human intelligence. I think we should thank him for showing us what our own deep minds can do, and for thus inspiring us. I am sure you will join me in hoping he achieves his goal of becoming a pro. Hikaru, Sumire, Haruto...
Whenever I write about blind players, several people pop up with questions about more information. I have no special access. But you may wish to try
keitaigoban.19@gmail.com. This is an address for a society devoted to making portable go boards (i.e. keitai goban) for visually impaired people. They operate on a crowdfunding basis. The main contact, I believe, is Okamura Haruo.