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Sai's sex
Keywords: Humour
jesusin: I am just kidding, please do no take this too seriously. My Japanese friends have told me that Sai is a man. I had always thought she (sorry, he) was a woman. jvt: Same for Touya Akira. Not a girl they say. What do you think about it? To my Western eyes, his face, his hands, his hair, his hat, his ear-rings... look all very feminine. What to say about his chin? Hundreds of years trapped in a goban without shaving and there is not even a begining of a beard!!! ;-) Hikaru No Go popularity is going to raise a new generation of Western homosexual go players ;-) splice: I doubt Sai is a woman. The emperor of Sai's time most likely would not have had a woman as a go tutor. And I'm pretty sure Akira is very definitely a boy's name. Virag0?: Traditionally Japanese are not shown as hirsute. I would say that Sai is a "gentle" man.(All together, now:"sigh!) This is from a post on the subject in rec.games.go (the post was signed by DW, sorry I cannot cite the author better): To a western eye unaccustomed to Japanese manga, perhaps, but if you familiarize yourself with a variety of other manga titles you'll realize any such judgement is overly hasty. Different artists and genres have different styles of course, but there is a long tradition of the "beautiful male" (aka "bishonen") in Japanese comics and whole genres devoted to it. You also need to consider the period Sai is from, most westerners only see images of modern or "samurai" japan. Sai is from a much older period, and a culture where poetic skill was prized above just about anything, where communication among the elite was frequently via poetry and the selection of the selection of paper was as important as the words. Women were not supposed to be directly seen by men, people entertained themselves at "moon viewing parties" and the like. I'd venture to say most men from such an environment would seem feminine by most modern standards. My friend (whom is incidentally the only one who has read Hikaru No Go, yet still refuses to learn the game) and I have a slightly different take. While we acknowledge he could just be a bishonen character thrown in for the heck of it, we think Sai is intentionally gender neutral. If you look at him closely, he may not seem male, ut then again, he doesn't seem all together female eiher. We believe that this was a deliberate device to show that his gender does not really matter, and to further his image as an embodyment of Go. We never noticed any spoken hint to a trace of the sexuality of Sai anywhere. So it appears to us that this gender neutral-ness is to emphasize the fact that the only reason for Sai's exhistance is Go. Just our two cents. --BlueWyvern Dieter: As someone said on rgg, there is an episode in which Hikaru makes a very bad comment on women playing Go. Sai corrects Hikaru and tells about the ancient times and that even then women played Go. All of this would be nonsensical if Sai were a woman him/herself. Scartol: And besides, there's a little interstitial line drawing thing at the beginning of one of the episodes where the author complains about being asked (erroneously) "Is Sai a woman?" all the time.. My full respect to Japanese people. My full respect to Western people. My full respect to homosexual people. My full respect to Hikaru No Go Junkies. My full respect to Fujiwarano Sai. If you have felt offended by my words, please accept my apologies and feel free to delete it all. This is a copy of the living page "Sai's sex" at Sensei's Library. (C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0. |