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Foreword

The first substantive knowledge of the Chinese game of go in the in the western world dates from 1687, when the young Chinese scholar Shen Fuzong explained the game to Thomas Hyde at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. Shen, brought to Europe by a Jesuit missionary, had already been paraded at the Versailles court where the Sun King Louis requested a demonstration of chopsticks—but on gold plates, naturally.

Although Hyde was alert to the merits of the game and wrote about it, he clearly had only a fuzzy grasp of it, and go caught on in Europe no more than did chopsticks.

It was not until the self-imposed isolation of Japan was breached by Commodore Perry’s “black ships” in the mid 19th century and westerners began flocking there that its devotees learned enough to play an actual game and to teach others. Go had reached Japan from China over a thousand years before, and had been developed into its “national game.” A tiny handful of westerners even became tolerably proficient. The most notable was the chemist Oskar Korschelt, who studied at the school of the top player, Honinbo Shuho. He got to within a six-stone handicap of Shuho. On his return to Germany, Korschelt, who found “exceptional pleasure” in studying Shuho’s openings, shared his delight on the game with his 1884 work Das “Go”-Spiel. In itself, this was probably the single most important work that introduced the game to the west, but it had added importance in that it was heavily used by Arthur Smith for his Game of Go. This latter work had the advantage of being in English and published (by Tuttle, be it noted) in the large market of America.

Smith’s book was the one I learned from, also with exceptional pleasure. It is still a worthy book, but dated. It is not just that the references to players and openings are out of date, but that the rules are now a little different.

Despite all the merits of the Korschelt and Smith books, the plain fact was that in their heyday go was still a fringe activity in the west. There were a few clubs, but next to no materials for teaching beyond the beginner stage, and for most players just getting equipment to play on was a major problem. Many players of my generation, myself included, began by using makeshift boards with confectionary or drawing pins for the pieces.

The transition to the modern position of the game, where go is played widely outside the Far East, with a massive number of clubs and tournaments, well over 200 non-beginner books in English and a profusion of cheap equipment, did not begin until around 1960.

The first edition of this book, then called Stepping Stones to Go, was an important part of that movement.

Buoyed up by its people’s spectacular post-war economic recovery, the Japanese government began a concerted campaign of garnering goodwill overseas. Go was part of the drive. The go professionals’ organisation, the Nihon Ki-in, was encouraged to start a magazine in English, to send professionals abroad to teach, and to hold international tournaments for amateurs. Many Japanese amateurs such as Kishikawa also made strenuous efforts to share their beloved game with new western friends.

The movement was so successful that nowadays go is no longer seen as a strange game in the west. Figures are loosely bandied around but the most conservative claim is that there are about 27 million regular players in the world with about 5 million of those outside the Far East. Around 60 countries participate in the World Amateur Championship that has been held annually in Japan since 1979 (there were sporadic events before that), and over 600 players, professional and amateur, played go in the first World Mind Sports Games, held in conjunction with the Olympics in Beijing in 2008.

The Japanese government’s efforts to foster go were not limited to the west. Top players from China, Taiwan, and Korea were allowed to become professionals in Japan, and there were also high-level goodwill exchanges, especially in China where the game had languished somewhat throughout the upheavals of the 20th century. Naturally, the aim was to promote international relations rather than the game, but here too success was great. Even in the last few months of when I write, while politicians and newspapers talked of stalled arms talks with “evil” North Korea, ordinary North Koreans were mixing with go players of other nations in the WMSG and events in Japan. Proof yet again that even if chess is a game of war, go is a game of co-existence.

To a degree it could be said that the Japanese drive was too successful. At least, the top players in the world are now considered to be Korean (for example, Lee Changho and Lee Sedol), or Chinese (Gu Li and Chang Hao). A further characteristic has been the extreme youth of the Korean and Chinese players. Lee Changho (born in 1975) won his first world championship at the age of 16.

But in many ways go remains stronger in Japan than elsewhere. There is more money in go there, more professionals, more events, more books, more magazines. And although official efforts to spread the game overseas have eased off, it is the long-running Japanese manga (comic) Hikaru no Go which has brought in a massive new generation of young people into the game in recent years in both east and west.

What I am driving at is that, despite the prominence of Korean and Chinese players at the top, much of go in the west still bears the stamp of Japanese influence, both historical and modern. It is still a good idea to learn from a book by a Japanese author.

The rules that most western people are familiar with are Japanese. (Chinese rules differ slightly but Korean rules are the same as Japanese). Japanese terms such as ko, joseki, fuseki, aji, and hane are in wide use among western players, whereas no Chinese or Korean terms have made the grade

So the advice in this proven primer, Go Fundamentals, remains as valid as ever it was. More so in that it is now much easier to find equipment, opponents and tournaments. In the USA the best starting point is the American Go Association, http://www.usgo.org/. In Europe, where every country has its own association, a good starting point is the European Go Federation site, http://www.eurogofed.org/. Outside these areas the go wiki encyclopaedia Sensei’s Library http://senseis.xmp.net/ will guide you to the relevant organisations. If you need to ask questions, the moderated forum http://www.godiscussions.com/ is your best port of call.

Once you can play, you can also find many opponents worldwide, of any strength, through online games on the internet. Most westerners seem to play on KGS at http://www.gokgs.com/ though there are several other servers (Sensei’s Library has all the advice you need for these). Note that Japanese rules are the norm on the servers.

How far can you go if you learn in the west? Well, there are now western professionals. Michael Redmond from San Francisco has reached the top rank of 9-dan in Japan. Alexandre Dinerchtein of Russia is a professional 3-dan in Korea and Joanne Missingham from Australia (but living in San Diego since 2004) qualified as a professional in China in 2008. There are also professionals living in the west, though their income here is from teaching rather than tournaments. Some are western born. Some are from the respective professional organisations in the Far East, despatched here on long-term goodwill missions. All these can be contacted via the sites mentioned above.

But even without striving to reach professional standard, you will be learning a game that puts you in intimate contact with some 2,000 years of Asian history and culture. It is a game that has been prized there above all other games for its ability to teach reasoning, self-discipline, creativity. It has long been associated with officials, scholars, and poets in China, as weiqi. Their most beloved poet Du Fu is only one of hundreds that have left us go poems, and every major novel from ancient China is replete with references to the game. In Japan the author of the Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu was a splendid player, and mentions the game many times in her 11th century novel. Her contemporary, Sei Shonagon, was also a strong player and mentions go in her Pillow Book. The samurai played go, but not as a game of war. From around 1600 the samurai may have been technically obliged to keep up their military training but in practice were mostly officials, and go was seen as a way of making them more, not less, civilized. In Korea, too, go, known as baduk, has long been the game of aristocrats and scholars, though until modern times they played a version known as sunjang baduk, still on a 19x19 board but with some starting stones and a different way of counting. Tibet still has a 17x17 version, with rather different rules, that is becoming a centerpiece of efforts to promote tourism in Shangri-la. Go tourism is also burgeoning in Japan and Korea.

Even beyond history and culture, go has things to teach us. With a world champion at the age of 16, it will be evident that strong players begin very early in the Far East. Five-year-olds are not unusual. How do they do it? There is no equivalent of our soccer moms and tennis dads. The most usual process in the Far East is for a promising player to go to live with a teacher. Rather than learn direct from the teacher, the child usually learns by playing with other children. Somehow or other, this system produces not just strong players but individuals who are well educated and well balanced. Not every child becomes a professional, of course, but that does not imply failure. Given the high intellectual status of the game for centuries, even just becoming a very strong player has benefits. In modern China, for example, proficiency in go is one way to beat the intense competition to land a place at an elite university.

At the other end of the spectrum, go has apparently been shown to provide beneficial intellectual stimulation that aids in staving off senile diseases. This may (like many of its benefits) be because it is a game that relies heavily on pattern recognition rather than pure analysis—right brain over left brain. In any event, there have been some remarkable stories. In 2006, Wada Kosaku, a former member of the Japanese Diet, being a 6-dan amateur (normally the highest grade of amateur) decided to treat himself, as a birthday present, to a game with a professional 9-dan. He lost by only 12 points with a four-stone handicap. It was his 99th birthday. But he was already a strong player. Not long before that, an amateur in Hokkaido reached the grade of 6-dan at the age of 100.

So go already offers us a mass of ways to enrich our lives apart from just placing pieces on a board. Yet there is still another facet that can make the game especially valuable for western players. Although go has traditionally been seen as one of the liberal arts in Asia, it has mostly appealed in the west to players who have some sort of background in mathematics or computing. The reaction of a fair number of these people to go can be seen in that of former world chess champion Emanuel Lasker. Intrigued by the game, he was nevertheless convinced that he and his friends could eventually match the Japanese masters through application of logic and analysis. In fact, he never got to within a nine-stone handicap (rather like queen odds in chess). But it is my experience that, once the shock wears off, such players become even more intrigued by go and realise it has new things to teach them. They are learning for themselves the exhortation of Confucius, from over 2,000 years ago, that one should “renew oneself day by day” Go has often been used as a model of that famous saying, because one aspect of it that fascinated even the ancients is that it is a game of infinite variety—the same game never appears twice.

But, if you prefer, there is no need to be philosophical about the game. The most significant fundamental of go is that it is just plain fun.

John Fairbairn

London, 2009