Life In 19x19

I am trying to find an idea of how much an old goban signed by famous players will cost (any honinbo) which is a piece of go history and in the other hand I'm curious about how much people in the western world will be willing to pay

Quoting from the GoGoD CD: "The January 2001 issue of Go World, now the premier Japanese go magazine, has an unusual advertisement. For a mere ¥33 million (roughly £200,000 or US$300,000) you can buy a 6-sun (~7 inch) shihomasa grain kaya board signed by Go Seigen and O Rissei. It also has the inscription rikugou or six harmonies, a Confucian term for the universe (heaven, earth and the four directions) favoured by Go Seigen when discussing 21st century go. It celebrates the successful defence of the Kisei title by O Rissei, who has not been afraid to experiment with 21st century go himself, having studied with Go Seigen."

This board is hardly historic, but the famous old ones are nearly all in museums and hardly likely to come up for sale.

My occasional reminder: "go board" is so much more tasteful than "goban".

John Fairbairn wrote:My occasional reminder: "go board" is so much more tasteful than "goban".

I think "goban" has more aji.

Famous gobans such as this one do occasionally show up on the market. The question is if such a cultural treasure shows up and you were lucky enough to chance upon the opportunity to purchase it, how much would you be willing to pay for it? Especially considering that it might only be available through an auction.

BTW, can anyone translate what is written on that goban?

Regarding the ¥33 million goban. The key to why it is so expensive is the cut, shihomasa which means "straight grain on four sides". It is the rarest cut which produces straight grain (masame) on four sides of the goban and it is the most warp resistant cut. It is very rare to see shihomasa grain gobans and they cost a lot of money as is. Couple that with the calligraphy from a couple famous go players and the goban maker can ask a lot for the board. And it does seem to be customary for goban makers to reserve their best gobans for such treatment with calligraphy from from one or more famous go players commemorating a special occasion.

The next best cut is called tenchimasa "heaven and earth straight grain" which means the top and bottom of the goban have straight grains. The sides will have irregular grain though.

AFter this there is the tenmasa "heaven straight grain" cut. This gives a top with straight grain and the sides have a mixture of straight and curved grains.

These three cuts are the most sought after when buying gobans.

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Now look at the Hyuga Kaya Floor Boards at Kurogoishi's Gallery of Wonderful Goods for some comparative study.

The thickness of the boards range from 6.1 sun to 8.5 sun so the ¥33 million goban 6 sun goban isn't really that thick.

Notice that of all these boards, only the last one is labeled "Tenchimasa" while the others are only labelled "Masame" (I would think that the others are probably the cut "Tenmasa". Notice that they do not have any shihomasa cut boards even in their Gallery of Wonderful Goods.

Now notice the prices they expect for their boards.

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If you google for "shihomasa kiseido" you will come up with an old out-of-date page which mentions that shihomasa gobans will generally cost you ¥900,000+. They had one on sale for a bargain price but it is probably no longer available. Notice that they don't mention whether it is a Hyuga Kaya goban though.

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So please don't assume that if a famous go player signs your favorite goban at a go congress, it'll automatically be worth an exorbitant amount of money.

Famous gobans such as this one do occasionally show up on the market.

Being historical does not automatically make a GO BOARD famous or important. Recall that Genan lost all his money in his shipwreck and tried to recoup it by dishing out 1-dan diplomas left right and centre, hence the derogatory phrase Inseki shodan. It is probable that he signed BOARDS just as freely. This may be an Inseki BOARD.

BTW, can anyone translate what is written on that goban?

That's easy. This BOARD says 百戦百勝不如一忍 - "Being victorious one hundred times in one hundred battles is not as good as being forbearing once". This (I think - don't quote me) is from the Chinese poet Huang Tingjian and he goes on with something like "One hundred words and one hundred barbs are not as good as being silent once". After that, rather like the second verses of national anthems, the subsequent lines become hazy in the memory, but it may have been something like "One hundred gobans are not as good as one GO BOARD".

The BOARD in question (if genuine) can be dated post 1830 from Genan's signature where he naughtily styles himself Inseki XI and Dagoushou (= Meijin). I don't know, but I'd be fairly confident that he was still willing to use that style after his shipwreck, since he was so far away from Edo in remote Kyushu. In that case this BOARD would be dated post 1853.

John Fairbairn wrote:Being historical does not automatically make a GO BOARD famous or important.

SURROUNDING GAME boards. No need to get fancy with the foreign lingo.

SURROUNDING GAME boards. No need to get fancy with the foreign lingo.

Touché, in a mild sort of way. But there is a serious point behind it. While there is room for some foreign words, like touché, they are mostly welcome when they fill a need. We do not need goban. It is no shorter than go board. It means nothing extra. The artificial distinction between legged boards and table-top boards is rarely sustained, is unnecessary and does not exist in the Japanese. There is also the point that it is artificially favouring the Japanese version over qipan and badug pan.

More to the point, it cannot be dismissed as harmless. Obviously it's not a threat to world peace, but it is my experience that people who cleave too much to Oriental terms (not just in go, but in other Oriental arts) are rather likely to be the type of person who wants to keep go exclusive. They often like swaggering round with exotic terms. The foreign terms are a shibboleth, insider's code or whatever. Keeping people out of the game in that way (I've found it to be surprisingly common) is not good. Exotic terms attract a few but repel many.

Be dispassionate for a moment. A board is one of the two most fundamental items in the game. Imagine you are suddenly asked to give a presentation to a class or members of the public on what go is. Would you really say, "You just need some stones and a goban." If you did, I think you'd lose several potential recruits, even if you did gain one potential weirdo. If you admit you'd say, "You just need some stones and a board" even if you yourself say goban in private between consenting adults, you've proved my point. We don't need goban. Ban it!

Along with kifu.

But if you really do need your fix of exoticness, since this is a thread on the value of historical boards, by all means let us discuss the mokuga shitan no kikyoku. What would be the value of that (not forgetting its kingin kikkou no gan)? We can't be sure if the gin heidatsu gousu and the bachiru no kishi belong with it, so we can't evaluate a whole set perhaps, but maybe we could estimate those separately. Maybe someone familiar with prices of looted items such as the ancient museum pieces that disappeared during the recent Egyptian uprising could give us a baseline figure to work with.

I like referring to go boards made with Japanese craftsmenship as gobans. It fulfills my need to emphasize the quality that is present in high quality go equipment. In my humble opinion and probably in the opinion of many go equipment connoisseurs, Japanese manufacturers of high quality go equipment produce the best available in the game. Therefore if I was looking for a great go set, I'd prefer to invest in a beautiful Japanese goban rather than purchase just any old go board, qipan, or baduk ban.

John Fairbairn wrote:The foreign terms are a shibboleth

Lolz.

But seriously, I quite agree, and use English terms wherever they work. 'Moku' is my pet hate.

John Fairbairn wrote:

SURROUNDING GAME boards. No need to get fancy with the foreign lingo.

Touché, in a mild sort of way. But there is a serious point behind it. While there is room for some foreign words, like touché, they are mostly welcome when they fill a need. We do not need goban. It is no shorter than go board. It means nothing extra. The artificial distinction between legged boards and table-top boards is rarely sustained, is unnecessary and does not exist in the Japanese. There is also the point that it is artificially favouring the Japanese version over qipan and badug pan.

More to the point, it cannot be dismissed as harmless. Obviously it's not a threat to world peace, but it is my experience that people who cleave too much to Oriental terms (not just in go, but in other Oriental arts) are rather likely to be the type of person who wants to keep go exclusive. They often like swaggering round with exotic terms. The foreign terms are a shibboleth, insider's code or whatever. Keeping people out of the game in that way (I've found it to be surprisingly common) is not good. Exotic terms attract a few but repel many.

Be dispassionate for a moment. A board is one of the two most fundamental items in the game. Imagine you are suddenly asked to give a presentation to a class or members of the public on what go is. Would you really say, "You just need some stones and a goban." If you did, I think you'd lose several potential recruits, even if you did gain one potential weirdo. If you admit you'd say, "You just need some stones and a board" even if you yourself say goban in private between consenting adults, you've proved my point. We don't need goban. Ban it!

That's an interesting perspective. I kind of agree. I suppose, though, that depending on your audience, there might be varied response to hearing an "exotic term". Some people might be turned off, as you suggest, whereas others might be intrigued. Still, I suppose that using "non-exotic terms" might be a safer route to take.

Do you think that it is constructive to construct English phrases, for example, when an exact English equivalent cannot be found for a given word? For example, should we avoid using the word "joseki", and try to either create a new English term, or make a new English phrase?

Koroviev wrote:

John Fairbairn wrote:The foreign terms are a shibboleth

Lolz.

But seriously, I quite agree, and use English terms wherever they work. 'Moku' is my pet hate.

Thanks - you've answered the nagging question I had in my head on reading Jon's post. I read it and thought to myself "actually, I quite agree, there's lots of Japanese terms you often hear about go when an English one will do perfectly well, and there's one in particular which really gets my goat, but I can't remember now what it is". Now I can, thanks to Koroviev "moku" really does annoy me, for reasons which perhaps aren't entirely rational, but which John above did a very good job of explaining.

Kirby: Really depends on the company. With someone who knows all the words, like a dan player, I'll use whatever comes to mind first. However, if I'm not sure of my audience, I try to use the English equivalent (framework versus moyo, 3-3 versus san-san, and so on). At least with beginners, I even try to replace words like 'aji' with 'risk', 'potential', or whatever. There are some words that have no English equivalent, like 'atari'. I like to play a few games of capture go with a beginner before introducing 'atari', though I get to it inside the first session. Until I build up to that, I just say things like, "Be careful, that stone's in danger of being surrounded", or "Look out, I'm trying to cut off the air supply of that stone", but I explain atari once the other player gets the basic rules. So no, it's not worth coming up with English words when no existing english word seems to work, but if there is any hesitation in my mind as to whether my audience will know what I mean, I try to use the more clear term.

I mean, I know san-san is 3-3, but I STILL don't remember what the 3-4, the 4-4, and so on are in Japanese. Those two are my pet annoyances, because I have to try to decipher them every time they're referenced.

edit: I think I actually stopped playing for a while as a beginner, because people I talked to were over-mystifying things.

The Mokuga Shitan no Kikyoku (木画紫檀碁局) is indeed a beautiful goban. But this thread isn't really talking about gobans housed in museums. If such a goban were available on the market, how much would people be willing to spend on it? I'm sure if someone replicated it with the same type of materials (inlaid silver, gold and tortoise shell; revealed metal decorations in lacquer; and stained ivory pieces), it would still be worth quite a bit of money to an eager go equipment connoisseur.

There is a nice French page with quite a few nice looking old gobans for anyone interested.

I like referring to go boards made with Japanese craftsmenship as gobans. It fulfills my need to emphasize the quality that is present in high quality go equipment. In my humble opinion and probably in the opinion of many go equipment connoisseurs, Japanese manufacturers of high quality go equipment produce the best available in the game.

I agree about the quality, though I see no reason why goban should imply craftsmanship. It doesn't in Japanese. But there are plenty of people who disagree about Japanese being best. When I wrote the Go Almanac piece on boards you have quoted, Richard Bozulich received a very irate and rude letter, from someone still active in the go world, which essentially accused him of racism against the Chinese. Since I had actually written the piece to Richard's specifications - he wanted to boost sales of the Japanese equipment he stocked - he was reluctant to show me the letter at first. He did eventually and it led to a long, friendly and useful correspondence when I wrote to the disgruntled one. Despite that, I still much prefer Japanese equipment. I have been lucky enough to sit with board makers as they carved the legs and planed the boards, and once spent several days in Tendo seeing the best shogi pieces being made. For someone who never got much beyond making a bookshelf, that sort of craftsmanship makes a big impression.

I have also been lucky to play on some of the best equipment in Japan. That too is a magical experience. But none of that has ever made me feel I want to own a kaya board and hamaguri stones. I have one battered katsura board and glass stones. I recently threw out a Chinese set and a magnetic set as I never use them.

The relevance of that is partly that the aesthetics of the game have an important but perhaps unreliable relationship to marketing it. Paul Smith (a UK player) wrote a paper for the 2008 ICOB in which he did (or quoted, can't remember) a survey which looked at two groups of games players. One group was those who liked board games but were not go players. They were asked for positive and negative comments about go. Among these, the most significant positive comments, by some margin, related to the beauty/elegance of the game and its equipment.

Among those who were already go players, the aesthetics featured rather lower, though it was still a very positive factor. The top positive among these people was that go is a very deep game strategically and this was followed by "simple rules" (which was also a positive, but a lowish one, for the first group).

Paul inferred from this, as I recall, that the aesthetics of go should be something that we should focus on very strongly in our PR.

Going off at a tangent, this survey also gave food for thought in the debate (in the UK) about whether to present go as "challenging" or as "easy enough to learn in a few minutes". The prevailing preference at the time was avoid "challenging" and to dumb down instead. I think that the balance has now swung the other way, and Paul's survey seems to provide some support for that.

From memory, the survey also showed that difficulties with rules or scoring contributed to only a small proportion of negative comments on the game. Under 10% as I recall. The biggest negative comment by far was that the game requires too much dedication. That may seem like support for the idea of not presenting go as "challenging", but (a) the proportion of people who preferred go because of its deep strategy was even higher, and (b) why live a lie? Go is deep.

Actually Paul himself addressed the question of why go was seen in a negative way as requiring too much dedication and yet chess and bridge did not. I can't remember what he said about it, but I recall wondering whether the relative lack of books, or maybe friends to ask about the game, left people feeling a little helpless when it came to go.

However, I repeat, it seems that banging on about the attractiveness of go equipment may overcome some of the negative images. We go players (but not the ones who want to keep go as the equivalent of an private garden pool stocked with exotic Oriental carp) should perhaps follow the adage: if you've got it, flaunt it. Forget those etchings - "Would you care to come up and see my go board?"

For robinz: your feelings about moku are far from irrational. Aside from all the other reasons for stamping on it, even the Japanese find it difficult to decide on the readings me or moku, or whether you can/should use shi instead. Importing a word is one thing. Importing a hornet's nest is quite another.