Tokyo - Day 2 (First Go club visit)

First activity related to Go in Japan! After so much sightseeing on day 2, we decided to look for a Go club to play a game or two and to give our feet some rest. We had already seen two Go clubs while riding a train but none when walking the streets. That had to be changed! We already wandered throught the streets at the evening of day 1, looking out for a club in the nearby area of our hotel, but without success. This time we were better prepared, we had an adress. Negative side: it was a printout and - of course - it was written in Kanji... After asking several people and walking and searching Nihombashi for about 90 minutes, 1k finally found the club (while 4k was busy watching an extremely cute mini-version of a Shiba Inu). A little nervous we took the elevator to the sixth floor where the club was located.

The first impression was really good: The club looked very nice and the material and the chairs and tables looked quite new. The playing material was of great quality (thick table boards, beautiful bowls, something that might be used in a German tournament for the top 3 boards). The place was huge, with at least 40 boards there. However, there was no one there but the owner of the place, which actually was a bit disappointing (and sad, it looks like a great club!). The owner was very nice but spoke only very little English. We speak only very little Japanese and the travel dictionary isn't of much help in a Go club at all (could someone please write a little travel dictionary for such occasions?). That's why small talk was really difficult. 4k made some good guesses here but maybe understood 5% (a pessimistic guess, maybe more) of what the owner was saying.

Since it would have been strange to turn on the spot, we stayed for a while. First, 1k and 4k played a game (2 stones handicap with 4k playing lots of rubbish) while the owner was watching and after that, the owner took 4k's place and played 2 games without handicap with 1k. All three games had one thing in common: They ended in resignation. The owner was really good and demolished 1k quite easily with great fighting strength. Of course it is not easy to say as the weaker player (or the even weaker player), but he must have been at least of European 3/4 dan strength. We didn't ask him, though, how strong he was (partially beacuase we didn't know if it was polite, partially because we didn't know how to say so).

Beginning of the first game between the owner of the Go club and 1k

After the games, the owner treated us to some coffee. However, we didn't stay very much longer since the small talk turned a bit strange and strayed over to German food (potatoes) and other things due to the limited command of each other's language (and we were hungry, too). We payed a small fee (we got a discount: 2 people for the usual price of one, maybe because it was so empty) and left the place.

For us it was not the exciting experience we had hoped for, but we would still recommend this club to anyone with a better command of the language. We are very positive that the club usually isn't as empty as during our stay plus the owner is a very kind man. Next club we try might be the Nihon Ki-in's. So if you're interested in that, stay tuned (and mabe leave a comment, too!).

In the near future we'll create a Google maps for all the Go clubs we visited in Tokyo and Osaka.