My family had moved to Karuizawa at the end of July, and I had been commuting between Karuizawa and Hakoné. Since the trip took seven hours each way, I had to leave my summer house the day before a session. After a session I would spend the night in Hakoné or Tokyo. Each session thus cost me three days. With sessions each fifth day, I had to set out again after a two-day rest. Then I had to do my reports, and it was an unpleasantly rainy summer, and in the end I was exhausted. The reasonable thing, it might be said, would have been to stay on at the Hakoné inn; but after each session I would hurry off, scarcely finishing my dinner.

It was hard for me to write about the Master and Otaké when we were together at the inn. Even when I stayed overnight at Hakoné I would go down to Miyanoshita or Tōnosawa. It made me uncomfortable to write about them and then be with them at the next session. Since I was reporting on a match sponsored by a newspaper, I had to arouse interest. A certain amount of embroidering was necessary. There was little chance that my amateur audience would understand the more delicate niceties of Go, and for sixty or seventy installments²⁸ I had to make the manner and appearance and gestures and general behavior of the players my chief material. I was not so much observing the play as observing the players. They were the monarchs, and the managers and reporters were their subjects. To report on Go as if it were a pursuit of supreme dignity and importance—and I could not pretend to understand it perfectly—I had to respect and admire the players. I was presently able to feel not only interest in the match but a sense of Go as an art, and that was because I reduced myself to nothing as I gazed at the Master.

I was in a deeply pensive mood when, on the day the match was finally recessed, I boarded a train at Ueno Station for Karuizawa. As I put my baggage on the rack, a tall foreigner hurried over from across the aisle some five or six seats forward.

“That will be a Go board.”

“How clever of you to know.”

“I have one myself. A great invention.”

The board was a magnet decorated with gold leaf, very convenient for playing on a train. In its cover it was not easy to recognize as a Go board. I was in the habit of taking it with me on my travels, since it added little to my baggage.

“Suppose we have a game. I am fascinated with it.” He spoke in Japanese. He promptly set the board on his knees. Since his legs were long and his knees high, it was more sensible to have the board on his knees than on mine.

“I am Grade Thirteen,”²⁹ he said with careful precision, as if doing a sum. He was an American.

I first tried giving him a six-stone handicap. He had taken lessons at the Go Association, he said, and challenged some famous players. He had the forms down well enough, but he had a way of playing thoughtlessly, without really putting himself into the game. Losing did not seem to bother him in the least. He went happily through game after game, as if to say that it was silly to take a mere game seriously. He lined his forces up after patterns he had been taught, and his opening plays were excellent; but he had no will to fight. If I pushed him back a little or made a surprise move, he quietly collapsed. It was as if I were throwing a large but badly balanced opponent in a wrestling match. Indeed this quickness to lose left me wondering uncomfortably if I might not have something innately evil concealed within me. Quite aside from matters of skill, I sensed no response, no resistance. There was no muscular tone in his play. One always found a competitive urge in a Japanese, however inept he might be at the game. One never encountered a stance as uncertain as this. The spirit of Go was missing. I thought it all very strange, and I was conscious of being confronted with utter foreignness.

We played on for more than four hours, from Ueno to near Karuizawa. He was cheerfully indestructible, not in the least upset however many times he lost, and seemed likely to have the better of me because of this very indifference. In the face of such honest fecklessness, I thought myself rather perverse and cruel.

Their curiosity aroused by the novel sight of a foreigner at the Go board, four or five other passengers gathered around us. They made me nervous, but they did not seem to bother the foreigner who was losing so effortlessly.

For him it was probably like having an argument in a foreign language learned from grammar texts. One did not of course wish to take a game too seriously, and yet it was quite clear that playing Go with a foreigner was very different from playing Go with a Japanese. I wondered whether the point might be that foreigners were not meant for Go. It had more than once been remarked at Hakoné that there were five thousand devotees of the game in Dr. Dueball’s Germany, and that it was beginning to attract notice in America too. One is of course rash to generalize from the single example of an American beginner, but perhaps the conclusion might be valid all the same that Western Go is wanting in spirit. The Oriental game has gone beyond game and test of strength and become a way of art. It has about it a certain Oriental mystery and nobility. The “Honnimbō” of Honnimbō Shūsai is the name of a cell at the Jakkōji Temple in Kyoto, and Shūsai the Master had himself taken holy orders. On the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of the first Honnimbō, Sansa,³⁰ whose clerical name was Nikkai, he had taken the clerical name Nichion. I thought, as I played Go with the American, that there was no tradition of Go in his country.

Go came to Japan from China. Real Go, however, developed in Japan. The art of Go in China, now and three hundred years ago, does not bear comparison with that in Japan. Go was elevated and deepened by the Japanese. Unlike so many other civilized arts brought from China, which developed gloriously in China itself, Go flowered only in Japan. The flowering of course came in recent centuries, when Go was under the protection of the Edo Shogunate. Since the game was first imported into Japan a thousand years ago, there were long centuries when its wisdom went uncultivated. The Japanese opened the reserves of that wisdom, the “road of the three hundred and sixty and one,”³¹ which the Chinese had seen to encompass the principles of nature and the universe and of human life, which they had named the diversion of the immortals, a game of abundant spiritual powers. It is clear that in Go the Japanese spirit has transcended the merely imported and derivative.

Perhaps no other nation has developed games as intellectual as Go and Oriental chess. Perhaps nowhere else in the world would a match be allotted eighty hours extended over three months. Had Go, like the No drama and the tea ceremony, sunk deeper and deeper into the recesses of a strange Japanese tradition?

Shūsai the Master told us at Hakoné of his travels in China. His remarks had to do chiefly with whom he had played and where and at what handicap.

“So I suppose the best players in China would be good amateurs in Japan?” I asked, thinking that Chinese Go must after all be fairly strong.

“Something of the sort, I should think. They may be a touch weaker, but I should think a strong amateur there would be a match for a strong amateur here. They have no professionals, of course.”

“If their amateurs and ours are about equal, then you might say that they have the makings of professionals?”

“I think you might.”

“They have the potential.”

“But it won’t happen overnight. They do have some good players, though, and I gather that they like to play for stakes.”

“They have the material.”

“They must, when they can produce someone like Wu.”

I meant to visit Wu of the Sixth Rank soon. As the retirement match took shape, much of my interest turned to the shape his commentary was taking. I thought of it as a sort of aid and supplement to my report.

That this extraordinary man was born in China and lived in Japan seemed symbolic of a preternatural bounty. His genius had taken life after his remove to Japan. There had been numerous examples over the centuries of persons distinguished in one art or another in a neighboring country and honored in Japan. Wu is an outstanding modern example. It was Japan that nurtured, protected, and ministered to a genius that would have lain dormant in China. The boy had in fact been discovered by a Japanese Go player who lived in China for a time. Wu had already studied Japanese writings on Go. It seemed to me that the Chinese Go tradition, older than the Japanese, had sent forth a sudden burst of light in this boy. Behind him a profound source of light lay buried in the mud. Had he not been blessed with a chance to polish his talents from his very early years, they would have lain forever hidden. No doubt in Japan too, remarkable Go players have remained in obscurity. Such is the way of the fates with human endowments, in the individual and in the race. Examples must be legion of wisdom and knowledge that shone forth in the past and faded toward the present, that have been obscured through all the ages and into the present but will shine forth in the future.