Forum for Develop Your Stones Meien Style -- Push into the Largest Part of the Board
mistranslated word; and further commment. [#1324]
That principle is:
- play into the largest part of the board."
Bill: However, kara does not mean into, but from. Without seeing the book my first stab at a translation would be Push in from the wider side. (Side may be too specific for hou, but alternative is too abstract. More open may be better than wider, too.)
Gulp -- "kara" certainly does mean "from". But given the lines of play O Meien recommends in specific diagrams, I took the advice to mean something like "play into a position starting from the largest region", which could well be shortened to something like "play into the largest region". Also, it becomes clear very early in the book that "hiroi" is used to mean something other than its plain meaning as "wide". An entire chapter is devoted to examples, and maybe "valuable" would be convey the sense of what's meant. I meant "large" in the sense of "valuable", but really, only the examples convey the contextual meaning to someone who doesn't already know it.
O Meien only uses the title slogan in the preface, following a lengthy analogy likening planning in a game to the planning of an African safari. It's not used at all in the main body of the book, as far as I could notice, so I did my best to infer what he actually meant based on the analyses in the examples. I agree that I wasn't literal.
John F. Fred, you were right here to think of kara as 'starting from' but I think you may have been fooled a bit by the verb. Oshikomu is a tricky beast as it is really two verbs masquerading as one (one form can also pop up as oshikomeru). These were distinguished in classical Japanese as shimo nidan and yodan conjugations, but leaving that aside the main point is that oshikomu is transitive here. You possibly have to add the missing object in English (e,g, drive in the opponent from the most open side), though 'pressurising' may do at a pinch. The state of osaekomi (boxing in, pinning down) is one achieved by successful oshikomi. ('Push in' suggests 'barge in' or 'invade', definitely not what is meant). Hiroi also has a specific meaning here, i.e. (most) open. O spends some time defining hirosa.
Not very long ago there was a popular tv programme here in England called One Man and His Dog, in which shepherds competed to drive (oshikomi) some sheep into a pen (osaekomi) from an open field. It was interesting that the sheepdog always sought instinctively to take up position in the widest/most open part of the field relative to the pen. It seems dumb brutes can be brighter than us killer humans sometimes, because O Meien points out that many go players aggressively attack from the direction of their strongest group (I remember that bit because that is what I sometimes do). However, that being wrong does not make it right to attack *towards* the strongest group, as O takes pains to point out. It may be, but it's often better yet to attack from the most open side, which is often the centre (i,e, go is the surrounding game, not the chasing away game). O is definitely not my favourite writer (tries too clunkingly hard for style over substance) but that's an important new topic in book terms. I suspect his later section on how to create width/openness to attack from is even more important, but I confess I haven't looked at it properly.
FredK: John, Bill, thank you both for your comments; I'll have to fix some things. Based on your discussion, I suppose the principle could be rendered as "Push at your opponent from the widest direction"; that seems a little ungraceful to use in the title as well, but probably clarity is paramount, so I'll use it there too.
John, you are quite right about my having trouble with the verb oshikomu.In fact, in the preliminary sentences on pages 44, 96 and 106 of the book, as well as in the discussion on page 129, O Meien is making some distinctions, involving that word, that I just can't follow. Since you seem to have the book at hand, I would be grateful for any explanatory comment.
John F. Fred. the following may help. Not the best prose but I've tried to follow the contours of the original.
p. 49 Go is a territory-taking game. For that reason "you can't win unless you press (oshikomi) the opponent in" somewhere. In order to get you to grasp the image of "pressing in", let us begin first of all with some examples of osaekomi, which is easier to grasp than oshikomi.
p. 96 If you are stumped for a move, "think first about building a wider structure". And I have just told you about "making a wider structure than the opponent". However, no matter how much I may say make a wider structure, it is not necessary to make a structure vastly wider than the opponent's. The trick is "making it a little wider than the opponent's", so as to attack severely once the opponent has entered your territory.
p. 106 I have told you about the relationship between "width" and "oshikomu". The theme was that by having width you can do oshikomi. The final part of Chapter 3 is "being able to have faith in width". It has appeared several times already, but actually "playing widely" is difficult. As to why, it is because the "wider" things are the more it becomes impossible to read them out, so that it "becomes impossible to have faith."
p. 129 A final word. Whenever "width is lacking", somehow or other push. You do not need to think about cutting. ... This position is fairly wide. I imagine you may all be confused by the various moves. Since, after all, pushing is a basic element in go, I would like to have you select a move by getting into your head the idea of "widening while pushing."
For others, unless you have the book this may confuse more than enlighten. "Pushing" is used in two ways in the book (even two ways in the same sentence). There is the usual go meaning, and there is a broader meaning that can perhaps be rendered as "putting pressure on" though there is still a nuance of forward momentum applied. O often seems to signal the difference himself by putting oshi in " " (to be regarded as underlining, not quotes) and he also of course more specifically uses oshikomi. "Cutting" above also does not have its usual meaning. It is rather "cutting through" in the sense of passing through the opponent's invisible boundary line. I'm not really a fan of Bruce Wilcox's sector lines, but they may (initially) be helpful if you want to consider them as a more mechanistic version of O's theory.
Karl Knechtel: ... All of this seems intended to clarify the original meaning of the phrase, but I'm more confused than ever. "The most open side, which is often the centre"? I don't know what to make of that. The centre is, by definition, the part that isn't the sides. Of course, the English "side" is remarkably ambiguous: it can mean "edge", or "either of two alternatives". Suppose I try to understand "open side" as "open space (/region)" - then what? What's the difference between attacking from open space, and attacking towards your strength?
![[Diagram]](diagrams/3/a993fa56c1e0e33dd987a51333ca50ee.png)
Tamsin: I've just bought this book, so I'll try to offer some things from it as I learn them.
By the way, I'd like to ask JohnF if he knows whether O wrote the book himself or if it was ghost-written for him, perhaps from his notes and directions.
While I don't want to fall victim to my own Book Buying Disease, FredK's page for the book and the discussion have aroused my curiosity, and it's a giddy thrill reading books in Japanese, now that I've realised that I can :-)
![[Welcome to Sensei's Library!]](images/stone-hello.png "Sensei's Library")