158.152.128.93: Murky origins (2008-07-03 20:48) [#4813]

John F. There does seem to be a lot of muddle here, but I certainly would not call on Go Seigen, Sakata or Wikipaedia to unravel it. Would you accept Einstein as an authority on scientific English?

It seems dangerous to quote Igo Daijiten as an authority, too, as the 1935 edition makes no mention of the term rendered as Magic Sword. This bungo edition would never pass up the chance to quote an esoteric term, and it does indeed wax lyrical about the one joseki line of this opening: it refers to the strings of stones jumping out as like the Rhine and Danube rivers. But it gives only two and a bit pages, and most of the diagrams are labelled "reference" or are extracts from games. The opening is clearly a new work in progress.

Takagawa may or may not be a good authority. He claimed the first occurrence was in 1928 and credited Kubomatsu Katsukiyo. But he obviously hadn't read Igo Daijiten as that gives the 1927 Hashimoto-Fukuda game that I think is the first occurrence. However, he was certainly well acquainted with Kubomatsu, who in turn is a good candidate for this kind of innovation.Be that as it may, Takagawa has claimed that the term originated in the early 1940s. If so, this was probably (my speculation) in a newspaper commentary, but no-one has been able to pinpoint it. Given the paper and circulation restrictions, and then the fire-bombings, that is no surprise. He also says it referred to a specific line (not necessarily to a joseki - the josekis then hardly existed). If we accept the surmise that a literary coinage was much more likely to come from a literary person rather than a hack go magazine writer (and recall that ordinary go players have come up with next to no names for openings over the centuries), we can see a very clear path by which it might have first appeared. Newspapers were then in the habit of employing famous writers to comment on games. Their commentaries are full of this sort of artistic stuff. Absent the actual article, this remains speculation, of course, but if it is true then it almost must, by definition, have referred to a single line.

Now all neologisms have a tough time surviving. Darwinian evolution applies even here and no-one is quite sure why one term sticks and another fades away. There has, however, been some work in modern linguistics that suggest factors that help the fittest prevail. Nadare (avalanche) has survived. This is a native Japanese term; it is a graphic image; it is a popular opening. Youtou is an endangered species. It is a Chinese term; it is a fuzzy image; the opening has been less popular than the nadare. Even a book devoted to the opening has the stilted name "The joseki known by the name of the Bewitched Sword" (Youtou to iu na no jouseki, by Hasegawa; which makes no comment on the name or the date of origin), even though the book on the Avalanche in the very same Super Book series is called just Nadare Jouseki.

But there is a little twist here. The term Magic Sword has become popular in the west, and has even spawned a Magic Dirk. Causation is the magic concept in modern linguistics, and the metaphor of a sword that enables you to perform magic is clearly potent. In Japanese, in stark contrast, a bewitched sword (the proper meaning) where the causation is enabling not you but the sword, and malevolently at that, is a much less appealing image. Indeed, so unpopular is the term in Japanese, I have never even seen it listed in a go terms dictionary (unlike nadare and tochka). The term seems almost to die out only for it then to be periodically re-introduced back into the wild from the zoo of obscure terms whenever the opening becomes fashionable again, as at present.

Furthermore, it is my impression that Magic Sword in English refers to the pincer itself, or rather the sword-like shape of the first three stones. But in Japanese there is a sense it refers either to a specific line or to the the bewitching mass of complicated lines.

These two points (different meaning - magic/bewitched - and different reference) seem to make a plausible case for treating the English term now as an independent creation.

The Japanese belief (in some quarters) that the Bewitched Sword refers to a specific line seems rooted in the likely scenario mentioned above. There has been a suggestion that the opening (I mean the 2-space high pincer) had a phase of popularity from 1940 to 1943, and this was when the name was first attached, but the records of many of these games were lost, and from those that survive it is hard to get a sense of how popular it really was. The opening appeared in Game 6 of the 1st Honinbo Final between Kato Shin and Sekiyama Riichi in 1941, and if a fancy name existed it would surely have appeared there. But the line there was a simplistic one, and not the tricky line that supposedly inspired the name. There seems to be disagreement about which line was meant, but all suggestions are based on post facto reasoning (i.e. this line is very complicated so it must have been the one meant).

Given that an early usage is youtou Muramasa (Muramasa of the bewitched swords) it may even have been the case that the first reference was not so much to an opening but to the person who played it.

It is hardly surprising that, with such murky origins, the term is fuzzy in the minds of modern Japanese. My sense is that it nowadays refers not to a specific line, but nor does it refer to the whole corpus of 2-space pincer lines (as I think it does with us). It seems rather to refer to the sub-set of lines in this opening that are predisposed to lead to complications.

DaveSigaty: I stand corrected (2008-07-07 16:48) [#4868]

Over the weekend I had time to go to Kanda and spend about an hour and a half browsing through the used book stores. I found that Bill was correct and that I was wrong in terms of the early use of the term. The earliest reference that I found was in a 1965 book by Sakata titled "Gendai Joseki" (Modern Josek). It referred to the magic sword as the 2-space high pincer in general. Several other books from about that period, e.g. another "Gendai Joseki" by Takagawa published in 1964 did not use the term at all. I found another book, "Taisha, Muramasa, Ohnadare" by Kobayashi Koichi published in 1981, that also referred to the 2-space high pincer in general.

Meanwhile among my own books I found that Go Seigen's "Gendai Joseki Katsuyou Jiten" (Modern Joseki Application Dictionary) published in 1976 had the statement shown...

Simultaneously the third edition of Igo Daijiten was published in 1976 linking the term to the specific edition (for the first time?). This is the diagram from Yamabe's dictionary published in 1985, but the text is taken verbatim from Igo Daijiten (Yamabe has nicer fonts and clearer printing :-)

The latest version of Igo Daijiten continues the practice of associating the term with this specific variation. However, I would have to say that based on my experience the term is not widely used in Japanese these days. I do not think that I have ever heard it used in speech to refer to either the general or the specific line.