THIS IS a somewhat convoluted story, but will, we think, lead to something new for most of you. In short, you have probably heard of the legendary joseki dictionary Igo Daijiten but will even more probably not have seen it. We are about to offer a glimpse.
But, first, how did we get there?
We were working through the Kido yearbook for 1987 when the old-fashioned headline konya no shirobakama 紺屋の白袴 over a game caught the eye. The "dyer's white trousers" was clearly not a normal go scenario.
A quick scan of the commentary proved especially interesting to a linguist, because it showed that this proverb was apparently being wrongly understood. Its traditional meaning is that the dyer leaves his own trousers last to be dyed - and of course they never get done. An English equivalent, just as old fashioned, is "the shoemaker's wife is always worst shod."
Here, however, the writer clearly had in mind an image of a dyer with white trousers that end up getting splashed - more along the lines of "the biter bit" or "people in glass houses." This was evident because the point of the commentary was that White, Abe Yoshiteru 8-dan, was famous for his knowledge of joseki whereas Black, Sakai Takeshi 9-dan, was just as well known for his scorn for joseki. In this case, Abe had played a tesuji in a well known joseki which, said the commentary, is given in all the joseki books but is actually a wrong order of moves (and Sakai punished it).
Bearing in mind Rin Kaiho's dictum (to an amateur boasting he had found the right moves, only in the wrong order) that "go is the right order of moves," we deemed this worthy of further investigation - a possible article for the GoGoD CD.
The easy first step was a database check. If it was a mistake, it was a mistake other pros had made, though on balance more did make the right order of moves.
The next step was to check the claim that the joseki books were in error, starting with the most recent. Several did not mention the joseki at all. Jungsuk in our Time (2000) gave it a couple of pages, which suggests it has been looked at by modern Korean pros. It perpetuates the "error." Ishida's Dictionary of Basic Joseki (1977) likewise. The Joseki Shojiten (1966), too.
That left recourse to the magisterial Igo Daijiten (1936). There were enough variations there to show (as is surprisingly often the case) that what appears to be a fairly short one-way-street joseki in fact has many frighteningly complex and long lines - but it still had the wrong tesuji.
So we were left none the wiser as to why it was wrong, or who had discovered its wrongness. But browsing through Igo Daijiten was, as ever, a pleasure, and that's how we came to think of penning a little description here.
But let us first end the mystification, and show the joseki in question...