Patronising the patrons
The game diagrammed on the previous page was played in 1687 and Black was Yasui Sanchi. He was the second head of the Yasui family, the one famous for initiating the first-ever challenge match. By the time of this game he was 70 (he lived till he was 85) but he had been known at Court since the age of 12 when he was introduced to the Shogun by his patron.
He remained at ease with the aristocratic life and despite the inconclusiveness of the challenge match with Honinbo Sanetsu, he was able to secure the Meijin-Godokoro post in 1668 by using his connections at Court. Later opinion is that he truly was of Meijin standard, but he was forced to relinquish the post in 1676.
His opponent here was Makino Narisada, Lord of Bingo (now Hiroshima Prefecture). He was castellan at Sekiyado, Shimosa Province, and Chamberlain to the 5th Tokugawa Shogun, Tsunayoshi. A very big bigwig, in other words. He was also an avid go player and took instruction from Honinbo Dosaku. He supposedly reached 5-dan late in life and took Black or two stones from the Honinbo masters (mostly Doetsu). But he was convinced they were merely patronising him.
Viewing the start of the game below, where Lord Makino was Black (apparently) against Honinbo Doetsu and lost, you can see why he might have felt that.
So he arranged to play a game on two stones with Yasui Sanchi, believing Sanchi would try his best to win as he was on bad terms with the Honinbos and would relish the chance to demolish him and expose his rivals. But Sanchi kept to the professional code and beat him by only two points. It was said that he meant the margin to be one point, but clearly his lordship was too weak and unpredictable to be kept under such fine control.
Tales abound of professionals deliberately beating opponents by 1 point - even in ancient China. Whether or not you believe they can be that precise, there is no doubt they will often deliberately keep the margin small or even lose. For example, Go Seigen described his first encounter with the warlord Duan Qirui as follows:
He treated me very kindly. He was a great go fan, and he would play a game early in the morning, before breakfast. The people around him generally made sure they lost, but since I was still a mere kid, I did not know that you were meant to humour him. At first, as a mark of respect, I played him on two stones. Since he was a pretty unreasonable sort of player, I killed almost all his big groups. After each game everyone would eat breakfast, but on that day Duan was in a bad mood and locked himself in his room without eating. Everyone felt nervous.
Later I was admonished by Gu Shuiru: "You're not supposed to win!" After that, Duan never played me again but just used to watch me playing other people. Even so, at the end of the month he gave me 100 yuan for school fees. At that time, if you had 100 yuan a month you could enjoy a better than average life style.
So it obviously makes sense for players to be respectful, and Yasui Sanchi was accustomed to court life - not just the shogunate's but the court of the retired emperor Go-Mizunoo - and had a feel for its ritual. This, at any rate, is the usual explanation of the first surviving games of White playing first. We know these are not misprints because they are clearly marked shiro tokuban (White plays first). The known games are dated to the Keian era (1648~52) and they too feature Yasui Sanchi.
If we look some other games where White plays first, from the Godenki (Go Transmissions), a 1652 book but often re-printed, only one involves Yasui Sanchi. One is between Honinbo Sansa and Rigen. But the date, 1652, is exactly contemporaneous with the Yasui Sanchi games, and Sansa is also given as Ko-Honinbo, or the late Honinbo. So there are two possibilities here for White being used to show respect: he had died (in 1623), but, more likely, the game was played at Court, as was common for Sansa, as the top player.
Three other White-first games in the 1652 edition of Godenki took place, if not in Court, at least in grand surroundings. One was in the Shogun's presence in Osaka, and the other two in the Nijo Palace in Kyoto. It is believed Sanchi even played one game in the Kinkakuji Temple in Kyoto - one more reason to visit that fabulous place.
These games involved the likes of Nakamura Doseki, Matsuyama Unseki, Honinbo Santetsu and Nakabo Tessai, as well as Sanchi. These were all, apparently, professional players rather than officials, and so having White play first (insofar as the records can be assumed to be accurate), seems to be not so much a case of showing respect to the opponent, as is commonly believed, but to the august places where the games were played. It may well have been a practice introduced by Sanchi as a way of showing off his knowledge of protocol, and died out with him.
At any rate, no matter how vague that speculation has to be, these examples do suggest strongly that Hayashi Genbi was reproducing the Sanchi-Makino game accurately and not indulging his creativity. They may also suggest a new ethic for modern players - respect the place where you play (or discuss) go. We wouldn't count on it, though!
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