The following may have curiosity value for some. I made a note of it when I was compiling my latest book on New Fuseki, but made no direct use of it there - when you read on below, I think you will easily understand why.

But the piece is interesting in some possibly unexpected ways. First, it appeared in Kido in November 1933, in the wake of the Autumn Oteai. Yasunaga Hajime, the editor of Kido, had already spotted a new way of playing by Go Seigen and Kitani Minoru that autumn, and it inspired his article. But the phrase New Fuseki does not yet appear. Yet only a couple of months later he published the book that did begin the New Fuseki craze, even though it also had Go's and Kitani's names on it. It was a blockbuster, not just with the public but with pros. Although experimentation had begun before 1933, and involved other players, the Autumn Oteai marked a kind of watershed, even though the experiments were still rather modest then. 1934, with Yasunaga's book selling tens of thousands of copies, was really the year of weird fusekis, with 1935 also providing a bit of a swansong.

Of most interest to me is the style of this piece. It's hardly a textbook way to create a mass audience. Tortuous, overblown, show-offy even, it was typical of the style also of much of the famous New Fuseki book. To a degree, I suppose, it was also typical of a more leisurely age and a more restricted though highly educated readership, but Yasunaga did not always write this way and it is fascinating to ponder why he felt the Muse upon him here.

He manages to invoke classical and modern physics by way of the Pharoahs and Versailles and several other magical mystery tours, without really saying very much at all - in fact, except to initiates, it's not actually obvious what he's even talking about. Yet this man, writing in this convoluted way, also managed single-handedly to put New Fuseki on the map and kicked off a publishing boom that helped establish in a major way the wider audience that we are part of today. I marvel at that.

On the new approach of Kitani and Go

Yasunaga Hajime

Insofar as go is an abstract theoretical system established on the basis of specific rules, it deserves to be in a special category. Inasmuch as it is a social artefact, it also cannot be denied that it is subject in the course of its development to social constraints. Some people will perhaps feel there is something strange in the social nature of a purely abstract thing like go. However, geometry originated from the need for land measurements pertaining to the flooding of the Nile in Egypt, and the theory of probability, which is the basis for the modern laws of probability, arose from the requirements of gambling by the Sun King Louis when the Bourbon court was at is height. If we assume it reflected the decadence of the lives of aristocrats of the time, it is by no means a strange phenomenon.

I believe the irregular fusekis played recently by young Kitani and Go are not at all of a nature that belongs to a simple theoretical category.

Japanese culture hitherto, including even in the Tokugawa era, has been influenced by eastern ideas from time immemorial which are not conjugate with the natural sciences. We have assumed that propositions in a form handed down from heaven are absolute truths and have taken the standpoint of investigating their development thereafter. As a result, such propositions have no internal connections of any kind between themselves and it is simply a disordered collection. In other words a theoretical framework has been lacking.

Go, too, has not been able to avoid social constraints in this sense. We see this actually in the innermost oral transmissions kept secret by the heads of the various schools. In the Kyoho era [1716-36], the prodigy Akiyama Senboku, because he had produced a newly compiled go manual as a book was hounded by the heads of the go families and became a heretic in his own time – not because they said he had made theoretical mistakes but simply because he did not conform to the families’ mores.

That being the way things are, although local revolutions have been achieved through the appearance of many a genius, fundamentally we are at a position today where we are governed by longstanding formulas which speak to prior occupation of the corners.

Yasui Santetsu (Shibukawa Harumi), celebrated as a master astronomical calendar maker, having made inferences from the Yi Jing, once tried playing first move at the centre point against the Meijin of the time, Honinbo Dosaku, but his easy defeat at the hands of the then pre-eminent Dosaku has become part of go lore. The Yi Jing not having itself left us any kind of specific model of a theoretical system, we cannot know from books today what sort of theory formed in the brain of Santetsu. Whilst this does not mean that there may have not been one or two attempts to shape a theory, an important reason why we have not seen more thorough investigations since then is the influence of the times in the senses mentioned above.

However, we ought to re-examine these things in all sorts of senses. If we assume that we cannot yet make definitive assurances in terms of theory that the corners are superior as regards territory and the centre as regards power, that go is a balance of this territory and power (often called influence), and in addition that the supreme point for territory is the three-three point and the supreme point for power is the centre point with komoku, takamoku and mokuhazushi somewhere in-between, these must surely be subjects of more thorough research.

The recent slump in world economies has plunged the world of ideas into an extreme turbulence that reflects that slump. Given that professional go players, too, are, in the end, members of society, there is no reason to say they are not immune to such influences. As to what is true, there is the questioning philosophy of Fujiwara Tei. There is at the same time a fundamental questioning rooted deep in the hearts of men of recent eras. So in go, too, we may be assured that revolutionaries regarding the old ways will appear.
We see this element in Kitani and Go. Whether or not the two young men are aware of it is not ours to ask. Their present games do have extremely great import (they bear directly on the livelihoods of the individual players). In particular, if they were to follow the usual methods when taking Black, they could be guaranteed of Black’s advantage to some degree, and so such research has nothing to offer beyond a more thorough investigation of go theory. It is an embodiment of attachment to the truth. It will not do to speak ill of this on the grounds that it is eccentric. The fact that they are not simply pursuing the unorthodox for effect is something people will realise if they consider their present research or their attitudes to their games.

At the fuseki stage, if we assume its merits are determined move by move, if we play the first move somewhere, we must determine by how many points the first player will win, making the best moves for both players. This, to be sure, is the ultimate goal of the game of go, and at the same time it implies the demise of go. Go is not approaching that point. Also, that is something that cannot be expected for a very long time. That being so, moves at the fuseki stage are not based on theory but must be seen as a kind of custom. However, custom it may well be but it is one that has a history of hundreds of years and so there is probably some truth in it. If there had been some fundamental error in it, it would naturally have been abandoned because of natural selection. However, we cannot draw a clear distinction between truth and error, and there will be local differences due to the amount of experience involved. In the same way that truth for a person with limited experience is that a stick bends when part of it is inserted in water, there are general truths which can be made to apply to any situation if they are obtained by such methods. The success or failure of the experiments of Kitani and Go is irrelevant. However, if they determine one way or the other, it will be a great epoch-making contribution to the problem of investigating go theory.

Newtonian physics had to cede pride of place to Einsteinian physics as regards electrons close to the speed of light and the phenomenon of radioactivity. What sort of changes will the experiments of the two young players bring about as regards the old methods? As we await their efforts we must watch with eyes open wide.

Perhaps due to the fact that it's been translated, I don't see the "tortuous, overblown, show-offy" style. I quite liked the article, though the second-to-last paragraph involves some pretty terrible (or at least terribly un-explicated) reasoning. Outside of that I found it pretty clear what he was talking about, but maybe I'm some kind of "initiate." If only "initiates" are capable of understanding this essay, I think the problem is less with the essay and more with the standards of education of the audience.

Thanks very much for sharing.

The past was a strange place.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

Thanks for sharing. An interesting read, though perhaps indeed a bit long winded

One small point:



Given that the 3-3, 3-4, 3-5 and 4-5 points are all referenced, I presume that the 4-4 point (or star point) was meant here, rather than the centre point (tengen)?

I think he really meant the Tengen.