1001 GoGoD games for your Coffee Break #20 (1 February 2013)

TMark · Post by **TMark** » Fri Feb 01, 2013 2:07 am

Many years ago, when I was a working man in the Foreign Office, my area of responsibility covered the Far East (I dealt with employment conditions of staff employed at Embassies) and this sometimes meant that I did some travelling. I also had, for a while, a very understanding boss who was a Japanese speaker himself, so I was able to get trips ending in Tokyo several years running.

In Tokyo there is a famous second-hand bookshop which specialises in go and shogi books. One time I walked in there and found four Westerners looking at books but they were there for shogi, not go. Occasionally, the shop would have new books, specially published and today’s game comes from one of those. It comes from a two volume set of the games of Komatsu Kaizen, who lived in the later 18th century and was considered to be the strongest “amateur” of his day. He scored 50% in a 10-game match against Honinbo Retsugen, taking a handicap of BWB, and this is one of those games. The books were printed and bound in the Japanese “butterfly” style, but with the numbering in modern style, so they were a lot easier to do than some of the other books I bought. The first time that I did a Tokyo trip, I got a phone call on my return home from American Express, querying a bill of more than £800 in a bookshop. The next time I went, I phoned them to confirm the charge and they said that they had a note against my name for similar charges.

Another week done and I now hand you back to our sponsor.