Nakayama Noriyuki

    Keywords: People

(b.1932-09-03) Nihon Ki-in pro 6 dan. Author, reporter and go writer. He has ghost written books for many top professionals and authored several for himself.

His teacher was Suzuki Goro. Nakayama began playing go with his maternal grandfather in Nagano at age 15 (1945) at nine stone handicap. By the end of the summer, Nakayama held white. His strength continued to increase till he was the strongest player in Nagano. After moving to Tokyo to continue his go studies, Nakayama obtained work as a game recorder for professionals. His skill at writing a kifu is amazing, he writes a whole game from memory at lightning speed. Each year he took the professional examination, passing just before his 30th birthday (1962). Since then he has defied the common wisdom that professionals reach their peak strength early in life. Each decade he has gained a rank reaching 6-dan in the 1990's.

He is now living in Kamogawa City in Chiba prefecture, Japan.

There is a picture on his [ext] Nihon-Ki-in webpage.

He was awarded the Okura Prize (for speading and promotion of go) in 2004.

Anecdotes

This was written by AvatarDJFlux on another page:

Nakayama is well known as one of the professionals that most toured the West to spread and teach Go. A delightful person, he's always ready to play amateurs (he even played me - a one-to-one game - during the European championship in Terschelling!). He's never hard-spoken when confronted with our stupid mistakes, but always says something encouraging, like: "Ah! New Joseki, neh?!", or: "Oohh! Stroong move! But maybe... this (playing his move...) better!!!"

MarkD: Actually I managed to get a big smile and a "Ohh very bad move" from him. After that he showed me a great variation. He is very friendly and helpful.

George Caplan: As stated above, Nakayama was go recorder for some famous and wonderful games, as detailed in his book "The Treasure Chest Enigma". However, the implication that he recorded games to make money and then became interested in the game is incorrect. He was a pro player when he recorded games.

Rafael Caplan is right. Also, one of the amazing essays of that book suggests that Nakayama's memorization ability is not really extraordinary for a pro.


This is a copy of the living page "Nakayama Noriyuki" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2005 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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