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,
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.
