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Iwamoto Kaoru, who died in 1999 at the age of 97, has been inducted into the Nihon Ki-in's Hall of Fame (July 2011).
The other domestic candidates were go players Yasui Santetsu, Genan Inseki, Kita Fumiko and Karigane Junichi, but haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (who died in 1902 at the age of 35) again made the short-list. I have confessed before to not understanding why. He also made the baseball Hall of Fame in 2002, which is equally mystifying to me. (As regards go, Kogishi Shoji lived in the house where this founder of the famous haiku magazine Hototogisu once lived, so maybe there was some patronage element, but how do you die as young as 35 and get nominated for the HoF without being a go player and without ever getting mentioned anywhere obvious, such as Hayashi's Encyclopaedia?).
The panel this year also considered foreign candidates: Chen Yi of China and Cho Nam-ch'eol of Korea. Both outstanding choices. We can safely imagine the diplomats in Japan's Foreign Ministry squirming in delight. But of course both Korea and China were important in Iwamoto's life, and his experiences there sowed the seeds of his interest in spreading go to the west, so by way of tribute and gratitude from GoGoD [Unasked, Iwamoto gave T Mark a special diploma signed also by the Meijin] and to mark his induction, I present below a couple of sections from his autobiography relating to his first experiences of those countries.
All ages are given by the Oriental count. Lop off a year to get the likely western equivalent.
EXTRACT 1 - KOREA
My father originally had an official post as a policeman, but he resigned and when I was born he was keeping silkworms and doing weaving work. When I was four, I emigrated with both parents to Korea, and so I remember hardly anything about my homeplace [Shimane Pref.]. It seems as if I can recall hearing the sound of artillery fire on the ship to Busan. It was 1905, so it was the time of the Russo-Japanese War, and perhaps it was the sound of artillery from a battle. My impressions of being in Busan are fairly intense. Among the friends I used to go to elementary school with, some are still living in Kyushu even now.
When we settled in Busan we were living in Choryang, to the north (now part of Busan City). I was there eight years and for elementary schooling went to the Japanese school in Choryang.
I learnt go from my father. When I was ten he fell seriously ill, and he taught me how to play to pass the tedious hours while he was at home after returning from hospital. As I recall now, he was a weak go player, perhaps about the level of nine stones from an amateur 1-dan [i.e. modern 6-dan]. After a while I was able to beat him in even games. There were lots of people who liked go nearby, and they would tell him, "You've got a pretty strong child." It became so that, when I had played everyone, there was no-one in Choryang who could match me.
In the summer of the year when I was eleven, when I was walking round the town of Busan, I found a go club. There was a sign outside that said a teacher called Habiro Seitaro was giving go instruction. He was from Osaka and was what is now known as a semi-professional. I was allowed to play him on nine stones. "Come every day," he would say. So I would go to school in the north of Choryang and, when school was over, would go in the opposite direction to the go club in Busan, where I got to play Mr Habiro.
I went up one stone a month. It was extremely fast progress, and since I was winning it was fun. Every day I walked to school and then to the go club. It was ten kilometres, and that's how I became a good walker.
I was made a big fuss of everywhere, people saying, "That's an unusual lad," and I was written about in the local newspaper, the Busan Ilbo.
In 1913, when I was twelve, Takabe Dohei (then 5-dan) visited the area on his way to China and came to Busan. He was then 31 or 32, maybe. I was allowed to play him on six stones and I won. It was the first time I was able to play a professional player. Takabe said to me, "Thought about becoming a professional?"
After that, I was able to play on five stones with a local professional from the Yamaguchi area, Nakamura Zenichiro (then 3-dan). It was my teacher Habiro who gave me the opportunity to play both Takabe and Nakamura.
Judging I had "good prospects", Nakamura strongly recommended that I should go to Tokyo and see whether I could really be a pro. If I was so inclined, he would give me an introduction to Hirose Heijiro.
I was keen and immediately consulted my father. My father didn't really say yes, but he eventually granted my wish and it was decided that, leaving everything to Nakamura, I would become a live-in pupil of Hirose. In April of that year, when I was twelve, I accompanied my father to Tokyo.
[....]
Being a child I did not really understand, but at that time Japanese people were lording it in Korea. It seems they did some pretty horrible things. But for some reason or other, the Korean women near where I lived were fond of me, I recall.
I also played go with Koreans. One thing burnt in my memory is the form of the go boards. They were just like the Mokuga Shintan no Kikyoku in the Shosoin Repository, a box shape hollow inside. When you played a stone a "ping" sound rang out. The go stones were crude, a mixture of shells and stones.
I also learned a little Korean, but Busan on the whole was a town where Japanese people lived.
EXTRACT 2 - CHINA
[At age seventeen] I went [to China to join Hirose there] at the end of September and stayed there for October, November and December, that is about three months. I was mainly in Beijing.
Formally it was at the invitation of [warlord] Duan Qirui, but actually a financial magnate called Wang Kemin was the sponsor and he took care of things for us. Wang later became Treasury Minister in the Nationalist Government, I believe.
I had gone to Korea as a child, but the impressions I had when I went to the Contineht at the age of seventeen were quite different from those of a child, and were extremely strong. My impressions then probably governed my whole life, I think.
I arrived in a place called Dagu near Tianjin, travelling by ship from Moji. From there I entered Beijing by ship. I felt it was a world totally different from Japan.
In the same way that I now think about spreading go to the world, Hirose also went there harbouring hopes to spread go to China. Go had come to Japan from China, but we eventually surpassed the level of the Chinese and go became Japan's national art. Now he was talking about spreading go back to China from Japan.
Duan Qirui bragged that he was the strongest player in Beijing. Even though he was said to be strong, he was an amateur, and so was not all that strong.
There were proper go players in China. Indeed, looked at through our eyes in Japan they were what we would call "semi-professionals".
The four strongest were Gu Sihao [= Gu Shuiru], Wang Yunfeng, Yi Ding and Liu Changhua. Of these, Gu was the strongest. He had studied in Japan and had trained at Hirose's place. He was Duan Qirui's official go player and received a salary from Duan. [Iwamoto was then 1-dan and took Black from Gu.]
[...]
We took lodgings at a hotel called Fusangguan in the Japanese quarter. In the mornings we would go to Duan's place and in the afternoon to Wang's place to play go, and we kept that up for the two months of October and November. [...]
At that time Seki Genkichi 5-dan also came from Japan, and I had a photograph taken with him in Beijing. There was already beginning to be be an anti-Japanese feeling in the air and so we were allowed to wear Chinese clothes in Beijing, as wearing Japanese or western clothes would cause ill-feeling.
I stayed together with Hirose at the Fusangguan but eventually, probably because of the cost, we were welcomed into the house of a man called Wu Yongju. That was in a purely Chinese area where Wu ran a school. I entered into a truly Chinese world there and lived with Chinese people. I was in direct contact with a country called China, of different manners and customs.
I learned some Chinese from Wu Yongju. Wu's school was funded by a Mitsui affiliate and he taught Chinese and the Chinese way of life and customs to Mitsui personnel who had come from Japan so that they could operate in China. I studied there. I would commute from there to Duan's place or Wang's place. For the two months I was in Wu's house, perhaps because he took a liking to me, he treated me with great affection.
I was also treated kindly by Wang Kemin. I was seventeen by the Oriental count, or as we would now say sixteen years old, and as a 1-dan was a strong go player. Since Wang would put down money as a winner's prize, I was grateful and would battle hard.
[...]
After I returned to Japan, in the following year, 1919, Hirose said to me, "Iwamoto, learn Chinese." Since I rather liked learning languages, I said yes, of course, and spent about two years commuting to the house of a teacher of Chinese called Zhang Tingyan in Aoyama. I thus became able to write, and so I also sent letters, as instructed by Hirose, to Gu Sihao. Actually, when I wrote I wrote in the vernacular. I understood the vernacular form better than the literary form.
For Hirose, I think he had the feeling from around that time that he wanted to spread go internationally, and making go flourish in China was a first step towards that. And that is the reason I came to learn Chinese. I think the influence of this was to plant in my own head the idea of trying to develop go internationally.
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This is year 8 of the HoF. Current members are, by year:
2004 Honinbo Dosaku, Honinbo Sansa, Honinbo Shusaku, Tokugawa Ieyasu
2005 Honinbo Jowa
2006 Okura Kishichiro, Honinbo Shuwa
2007 Honinbo Shuho
2008 Honinbo Shuei, Honinbo Shusai
2009 Segoe Kensaku
2010 Kitani Minoru
2011 Iwamoto Kaoru
Go Seigen has refused to be nominated while he is alive.
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John Fairbairn
