Bulletin Number Four 1986

Kitani Minoru, who was five years his elder, were arch rivals as well as close friends. On the occasion o f a trip together to the Jigokutani Springs in 1933 ， the two o f them conceived o f the ‘New Opening', which then set in motion a revolution o f weiqi. A t that time the Shusaku School, which advocated first methodi cally and firm ly establishing one's position in the comers o f the weiqi board had already dominated the Japanese style o f playing for almost a century. The ‘New Opening' emphasized the opposite, and advo cated all manners o f new lines o f play aimed at speedily and flexibly gaining dominance at the centre o f the board. Such a totally new thinking immediately captured the imagination o f the professional players as well as the amateurs, and its advantage and useful ness soon became apparent. In no time at all, this thinking became the main stream o f twentieth century weiqi playing and also became the forerunner o f the ‘Chinese School' created by Chen Zu-de in the sixties as well as the 'Universe School' created by Takemiya Masagi which is currently a predominated school. It was thus that the free and unrestricted thinking o f young Wu ushered in a new era o f weiqi. However, a price must be paid for challenging an established tradition, and in the hostile atmosphere then prevailing between China and Japan, it was also inevitable that there would be those who would look askance at a foreigner like Wu. Indeed, in the same year as the 'New Opening' appeared, Wu courageously adopted the new style o f play in an open game against the honinbo Shusai, who as meijin was also the acknowledged grand master o f the time, and imme diately incurred the wrath and hostility o f the con servatives in the Japanese Go (Weiqi) Association o f which he was a member. Thus unimaginably severe pressure was brought to bear on the young man o f nineteen who was all alone in an alien land. Besides, the many games that he had to play almost w ithout stop upon attaining the senior rank also started to take to ll o f his already poor health, and gradually his body was yielding under pressure as well. Exhausted body and nerve were probably responsible for his sudden decision to return to Tianjin to join the Red Swastika Society in 1935, his naturalization as a Japanese under social pressure the next year, and his need for complete rest in a sanatorium in the year that followed. When he regained health and came out o f the sanatorium in 1939, the epoch in which the title o f honinbo was handed down w ithin the master's family whereas the title o f meijin was awarded by concensus, and which had lasted several decades had finally ended. What followed was a new epoch in which the champion was to be decided by open tournament. Weiqi is an art and also a war. While it was exciting for a professional player to create a new style, yet there was no way o f excelling among one's peers other than to do battle and vanquish one's opponents on the weiqi board. The so-called 'ten-game challenge tournament' was the traditional Japanese system for judging the relative strength o f players and deciding upon professional positions. In such atourna ment the player who had lost four games in a row had to accept the fate o f losing standing vis-à-vis his opponent, and to a true professional this is tanta mount to staking one's life-long reputation at one big gamble. It was therefore also called 'the sword fight on the c lif f '. It was at the time when the guns of the Second World War began to thunder in Poland that the two young rivals, Wu and Kitani Minoru, started the well-known 'challenge tournament o f Kamakura', which lasted all together three years and ended w ith Kitani losing his standing by one step, that is down to the position o f senaisen. However, victory did not as in the past brought Wu the coveted title o f honinbo or meijin: it merely earned him the right to fight on w ithout a respite. During the next fifteen years, he had to do battle in no less than nine more ‘ten-game challenge tournaments', meeting practically all the best Japanese players, including all the honinbo after Shusai. Standing alone against wave after wave of top warriors who all tried their very best, Wu fought through a total o f almost one hundred games and, unbelievably, was actually able to stand his ground. Apart from the senior player Karigane who ceased playing half way through the tournament, he was able to force all other opponents such as Fujisawa Hosai, Hashimoto Utaro ， Sakata and Takagawa Shukaku down to the lower position o f senaisen or even josen ， namely a position lower by two steps. Such an unpre cedented and probably unduplicable record in weiqi history made that period unarguably the Wu Era, proving that he was not only an ingenious wezq i artist, but also a great weiqi warrior, the incomparable fore most player o f the time. Unfortunately the brilliant battle record and elevated title by no means brought him a secure posi tion or even special consideration in other tourna ments. Indeed, the epoch of the real 'challenge tourna ment' had already passed; in the 'title tournaments' which replaced it all new entrants to the tournament have to start from the same point, and no exception was made even for Wu, who had demonstrated su periority over all other strong players. Shabby treatment NEWS 5