Wu of the Sixth Rank was in a sanitarium at Fujimi, to the west of Mt.
Fuji. After each of the Hakoné sessions, Sunada of the Nichinichi would go
to Fujimi for his comments. I would insert them appropriately into my
report. The Nichinichi had chosen him because he and Otaké were the
reliables among younger players, strong competitors in skill and in
popularity.
He had over-exerted himself at Go and fallen ill. And the war with China
grieved him deeply. He had once described in an essay how he longed for
an early peace and the day when Chinese and Japanese men of taste might
go boating together on beautiful Lake T’ai. During his illness at Fujimi he
studied such works as The Book of History, Mirror of the Immortals, and
Collected Works of Lu Tsu.
He had become a naturalized Japanese citizen,
taking Kuré Izumi as his Japanese name.
Although the schools were out when I returned from Hakoné to
Karuizawa, that international summer resort was crowded with students.
There was gunfire. Troops of student reserves were in training. More than a
score of acquaintances in the literary world had gone off with the army and
navy to observe the attack on Hankow. I was not selected for the party. Left
behind, I wrote in my Nichinichi reports of how popular Go had always
been in time of war, of how frequently one heard stories of games in battle
encampments, of how closely the Way of the Warrior resembled a way of
art, there being an element of the religious in both.
Sunada came to Karuizawa on August 18 and we took a train on the
Komi line from Komoro. One of the passengers reported that in the heights
around Mt. Yatsugataké great numbers of centipede-like insects came out in
the night to cool themselves, in such numbers that the train wheels spun as
