reduce the proportions of Otaké’s victory. One can see that such a play
would have narrowed the difference to perhaps three points, even with that
unfortunate White 130. What would have been the outcome, then, if the
Master had not blundered and the “earthshaking” changes had not come? A
defeat for Black? An amateur like myself cannot really say, but I do not
think that Black would have lost. I had come almost to believe as an article
of faith, from the manner, the resolve, with which Otaké approached the
game, that he would avert defeat even if in the process he must chew the
stones to bits.
But one may say too that the sixty-four-year-old Master, gravely ill,
played well to beat off violent assaults from the foremost representative of
the new regulars until the moment late in the game when the initiative quite
slipped from his hands. Neither was he taking advantage of poor play by
Black nor was he unfolding a grand strategy of his own. The natural flow
led into a close and delicate match. Yet perhaps because of his health the
Master’s game lacked persistence and tenacity.
“The Invincible Master” had lost his final match.
“The Master seems to have made it a principle to put everything into a
game with the next in line, the one who might succeed him,” said a
disciple.
Whether or not the Master himself had so stated the principle, he acted
upon it throughout his career.
The next day I went home to Kamakura. Then, scarcely able to finish my
sixty-six newspaper installments, I went as if fleeing the battlefield on a
trip to Isé and Kyoto.
I have heard that the Master stayed on at Itō, and gained weight, some
four pounds, until he weighed upwards of seventy pounds; and that he
visited a military convalescent home with twenty sets of Go stones. By the
end of 1938, hot-spring inns were being used as convalescent homes.
