Hamahika Of Okinawa

    Keywords: Culture & History

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KGS FRIENDS (anyone), please use your knowledge, of japanese, french and anything else to help bring Hamahika of okinawa and his famous game with meijin back to life.

I am extremely curious. One day on KGS, I made contact with a wise elderly man. When I found out he was from Japan, I asked him if he knew any tidbits of information about igo / go and the archipelago (island chain) of Okinawa [ext] http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa.

This man on KGS was exceptionally bright. Even through the wires, I was able to feel how mentally quick this man was. His grasp of english was precise...this was the first clue. Then he opened a game with four handicap and asked me to play with him. As black, he resigned after the first move, but I feel he was testing by chance I might actually reproduce the game he had in mind. The game he proceeded to show me is below.

He told me he had memorized it 40 years ago (its 2004 now ;-) ). After looking at all games in the 17th century on gobase, and finding none with the meijin "syu-ei" he talked about (and i googled for). I found this page that talks about this Hamahika of okinawa from 1682: [ext] http://perso.wanadoo.fr/toru.imamura/dosaku6texte.html, and it goes:

Dosaku a joué en 1682 cette partie contre un Okinawaien qui s'appelle Peichin Hamahika (à l'époque, Okinawa qui se situe à l'extrême sud du Japon n'en faisait pas partie). Elle est célèbre comme une des meilleures parties à handicap. Notre meijin (le maître en japonais) a complètement dominé la partie en adoptant une merveilleuse stratégie de sacrifice, pour surconcentrer les pierres de son adversaire.[1]

[ext] http://gobase.org/replay/?gam=/games/japan/misc/disks/dosaku/dosak23.sgf

Here is the game he showed me (im having trouble numbering greater than 10 , maybe someone knows an elegant solution to this)

[Diagram]

19x19 diagram

[Diagram]

19x19 diagram


Andrew Grant: White is Honinbo Dosaku, Meijin. Black is the Pechin of Hamahika. You have the order of moves wrong: from memory (I'm at work today and can't check) it goes as follows:

[Diagram]

1-10

In fact in the actual game Black played B8 at a and avoided the trap. The diagram below is often mistakenly given as the actual game continuation; it is not.

[Diagram]

11-17




[1]: Hikaru79: Here is my translation of that, as best as I can give it. I'm still in Grade 10 of French, so please forgive any errors ^^;

Dosaku played this game in 1682 against an Okinawan named Peichin Hamahika. (At that time, Okinawa, which lay to the extreme South of Japan, was not a part of it.) This game is considered one of the best handicap matches. The Meijin (master, in Japanese) completely dominated the game by adopting a marvellous sacrificing strategy, in order to overconcentrate the stones played by his opponent.

Dieter: See also Basic Instinct Counterexample for the same sequence.


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