Kirby said
There are many Korean events with longer time limits
No, there aren't. Unless you want to be silly and argue about how long is a piece of string. If you take the year 2000 as a benchmark, Japan had 31 events with time limits of 8, 5 or 4 hours ("event" means preliminaries in some cases as they sometimes had different limits).
They had 4 events of 1,2 or 3 hours. They had 10 events of 10 minutes or less. Common sense tells us that 3 hours or less should therefore be considered "short". Korea also more or less matched that sort of distribution at that time.
The current situation is that Korea has a
maximum of 3 hours. But only three events open to men have this limit. This is not "many" and as we've just seen it's on the short side anyway. Eleven events have even shorter limits. Five of them (if three is "many", that's "very many") are Mickey Mouse 10 minute affairs or less. Even as (supposedly) prestigious an event as a world championship (the BC Card Cup) has only 1.5 hours. Most amateur events here seem to allow at least as much time as that. Many Korean pros - admittedly the older ones but big names like Cho Hun-hyeon - have denounced the shortening of time limits (for reasons that include them being a crapshoot), but they are spitting in the wind.
Now go back to 2000 again. At that time, Japan was certainly not inferior to Korea or China in international results. They may not have been markedly superior any longer, but they weren't inferior. The most distinctive characteristic of games at that time was that they mostly had long time limits in
all countries. In other words, there was a level playing field. I repeat, under totally level conditions, Japanese was not inferior.
Now one way a team can improve its winning percentage is if the goalposts are changed at one end. Far from this being a deliberate tactic by the Koreans or the Chinese, it could be said that the Japanese shot themselves in the foot. It was the Fujitsu that first made 3 hours the norm for international events. This, of course, was driven by mostly economic considerations of bringing foreign players in from long distances. Any sponsor in any country is governed by the same constraints. But the success and growth of international go attracted television and the internet. Given also the special conditions in Korea and China, where sponsorship was not as entrenched among newspapers as in Japan and was dicey anyway, it was inevitable that the pro organisations there would be attracted by offers from television, or from sponsors who hoped to get on television. This led, rapidly, to a shortening of time limits in domestic events as well.
This produced the current situation where Korean players and Chinese players play at more or less the same time limits in both international and domestic events. They are playing under constant conditions all year round. But when a Japanese player goes to an international event, he is used to
much longer time limits. For him it is not a level playing field.
In fact it is not a level playing field within Korea. You may think of some of the older players as dinosaur relics who should move over, but Yi Ch'ang-ho was brought up under the older time limits and achieved most of his success under them. Even when very young he regularly used most of his time allowance. The modern short games are probably a strain for him, and I for one am not convinced that Yi Se-tol, who came up under the new system and developed his style accordingly, is necessarily stronger than Ch'ang-ho.
It is not just a question of less time to think in each game. As I have suggested above, the shorter time limits have brought with them a change of style that is best suited to shorter time limits. Japanese players especially can hardly be expected to change styles in the space of a single international event, and it would be catastrophic for their main domestic careers to change styles permanently. Also, there are now no events (none!) where Chinese and Korean players get to play the top Japanese at 4 hours or more. We have to conclude, therefore, that lack of Japanese success in international events, wounding though it is to national pride, is not really a fair measure of relative strengths.
We cannot conclude, of course, that Japanese players are stronger just because they play more slowly. It's genuinely hard to say who is best. However, I am rather fond of relying on professional
opinion. What I observe, for example, is that the Chinese magazine
Weiqi Tiandi will often give 10 pages (i.e. about 10% of its entire space) to a commentary on a Japanese title match. Furthermore, the commentary will generally be done by a 9-dan or an 8-dan, whereas the Chinese title games often get assigned to 4-dans and 5-dans. In other words, the Chinese
respect Japanese go. That tells me more than the result of the latest Samsung Cup. The fact that some western players disrespect Japanese go also tells me something about them, and it's not in their favour.
One thing the Japanese can claim is to have the strongest go-playing prime minister in the world. But, somewhat to my disappointment, they still crave "parity" with the Koreans and Chinese. Recognising that time limits are almost certainly the root of the apparent difference, they have reduced limits drastically. There are now just 15 events at 4 hours or more, and a whopping 25 at 3 hours. There are 12 with less, but only 4 (for men) at the 10-minute level or less. Until players also change their style successfully, we are not likely to see actual international success. And in the interim, if the Koreans continue the downward trend below even 3 hours in international events (Samsung 2h, Nongshim 1h - only the LG has 3h and that only in the late stages), that means the goalposts the Japanese are kicking into are narrowing all the time. They will probably need to find the equivalent of Harry Potter playing Malfoy at quidditch.
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