The Past, Present, and Future of the Kansai Chess Academy (Part 1)
(1) Open your horizons
Compared with the Japanese chess academy built on the basis of the four-hundred-year-old gate, the Kansai chess academy has almost no historical burden, and the development concept has always been relatively open, which is not unrelated to the concept of founder Yutaro Hashimoto.
In 1950, when Hashimoto Utaro won Honinbo, he once said something very far-sighted: "The title of Honinbo has reached Kansai, and it is a topic at present, but considering that the future is to compete with the United States, China, and Germany, then It is a trivial matter for Honinbo to cross Hakone." Later, Hashimoto also proposed about the game system that chess players must not leave the chessboard during professional matches, and that lunch breaks and evening breaks are risky. For the viewing needs of modern audiences, a game of chess can be played for up to five hours. These ideas still don't feel outdated today in the 1920s.
In 1960, Hashimoto's teacher KenSekoshi organized a visit to China at his own expense, leaving behind the famous saying that "for the popularization of Go, even if you bury your bones in China, you will have no complaints". Yutaro Hashimoto, who had been with his mentor throughout the whole process, was naturally deeply affected, and like Setsukoshi, he also led a team to visit China at the age of seventy, and in 1988, at the age of eighty-one, he still insisted on playing in the Sino-Japanese confrontation. Hashimoto's world perspective is not only for China, as early as 1961 he accompanied Se Yuexian on a two-month visit to Europe. When flying between European countries encountered bad weather, Setsukoshi confessed on the plane: "If I crash like this, my whole life will be for the popularization of Go." Hashimoto visited Germany again in 1990 and witnessed the history of the merger of East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Kensaku Setsushi (center) and Utaro Hashimoto (left) bid farewell at Tokyo Airport in 1961 before going to Europe.
Influenced by such thoughts and actions, the Kansai Chess Academy is highly open. Guangdong and Hubei chess players Chen Jiarui and Li Yang, who had obtained professional positions in the Chinese Go Association, joined the Kansai Chess Academy in 1987 and 1997 respectively, which is unimaginable in the Japanese chess academy, which is deeply regarded by the door. The successful example of Hideyuki Sakai at the beginning of the 21st century made the Kansai Chess Academy firmly adhere to the principle of "breaking the concept of portals".
To this end, in 2009, the Kansai Chess Academy institutionalized the "test chess into the section" program and introduced a training chess player system, stipulating that chess players under the age of 26 (those under 30 years old who have won amateur competitions) can apply for the first three games with two chess players below the kansai chess academy with four paragraphs or less, and one nine-dan chess player can play three games first, and win two games to become a "training chess player". This threshold is quite easy, but if a trainee chess player wants to "turn the right", he must first qualify in the internal selection, and then win 20 wins in the seven title battle qualifiers (or enter the A stage of the preliminary selection) before he can be promoted to a full-fledged chess player.
The training chess player system has greatly expanded the "face of the world" of the Kansai Chess Academy, and south Korean Chong Duan teenagers Yoon Chun-ho, Hong Qingquan, and Hong Shuangyi have come true at the Kansai Chess Academy because of their unfulfilled career dreams due to their overage age, and Chinese female chess player Li Ting, American Francis, as well as the "second generation" Wang Jinghong (son of Wang Licheng) and Qingcheng Zhenyang (son of Tetsuya Kiyosei) have all entered the professional camp under this new regulation. However, there is frequent controversy about whether the system of training chess players is too broad, resulting in uneven professional teams, and finally becoming an embarrassing situation of "all those who are not determined by the Japanese chess academy to gather at the Kansai Chess Academy", which is frequently controversial, and the system was terminated in 2018.
In terms of competition innovation, the Kansai Chess Academy also has unique features. In 2016, young players from the Kansai Chess Academy spontaneously organized a tournament called the "Japan Go League", which consisted of six teams playing a three-on-three team match every month, divided into two stages: regular season and playoffs, and the whole process was broadcast live on the video website. Although the prize money for the champion and runner-up is only 200,000 or 100,000 yen, if you can persist and gradually accumulate popularity, it may not be a way out. By the second time of 2017, it had already attracted players from the central part of the Japan Chess Academy and the Kansai Headquarters to join, but by the 3rd edition of 2018, it was difficult, changed to two rounds a day, canceled the playoffs, and then quietly disappeared. The World United Team (members Tetsuya Kiyonai, Taihiro Nakano, Masaki Yu, Sun Yingshi, Hoshinobu Hataka, Yasuhiro Mine, Kim Jong-joon, Hong Qingquan, Kang Minhou, Wu Baiyi, Francis, and Hong Shuangyi) and The Wave Speed Team (team members Masayuki Kurahashi, Tototo Imano, Tokuhito Tsuji, Takuya Okawa, and Yuu Watanabe) won the first two and three championships respectively.
Photos of the Japan Go League, the loser is Kawaei Ichiroku, who won the first Lark Cup World Go Open tournament in 2012.
The Sankei Cup Pro-Am Tournament, sponsored by the Sankei Shimbun, was founded in 2005 as a novel event. The Kansai Chess Academy players are pre-selected to produce sixteen places in the tournament, and the other sixteen seats are for all Japanese amateur chess players, and the first round of this tournament adopts the lottery rules of professional and amateur confrontation, and the chess parts are professional chess players to men's amateurs, women's amateurs to give way to two sons, and men's amateurs to women's amateurs. Such a formal competition that directly tests the face of professional chess players can only exist for a long time in the Kansai Chess Academy, which dares to innovate, and Satoshi Hiraoka, Hong Qingquan (who was an amateur at the time), and Tomoya Yanagida reached the final in 2008, 2009 and 2013 and won the runner-up.
The Sankei Cup's innovation does not stop there, in 2014 it invited newly born European professional chess players to participate in the preliminary selection, and in 2015 it was expanded to two European and American players. North American Liu Zhiyuan and European Atrium left a record of defeating He Yingyi and Yuan Tian Yongyi to enter the tournament, and Liu Zhiyuan, the protagonist of the American Go documentary "Go", played until the round of sixteen in this tournament. Unfortunately, due to the decline in sales of Sankei Shimbun and the reduction of business, this tournament was suspended in 2019 together with the women's celebrity battle it also sponsored, and it was impossible to see the future of Japanese amateur and European and American chess players.
In 2014, European chess player Pavolliz entered the highest level of the Kansai Chess Academy, "Yoshiakima" (the eleventh chairman of the board of directors Shojiro Shiokawa inscription "Ruyi Auspicious") matchroom, and fought against the top chair Yutaro Hashimoto's "Rain Wash Wind Mill" scroll against the top chair Satoshi Yuki, although he was defeated.
(2) Family operations
A distinctive feature of the Japanese Go community is family succession, which is consistent with the situation in Japan's various handicraft industries. The Kansai Chess Academy is particularly prominent, as are the aforementioned brothers Naoto Miyamoto and Miyamoto Yoshihisa, higashino Hiroaki and Higashino political brothers, Shiraishi Hiroshi and Shiraishi Kyoko father and daughter, Kiyonaise Tetsuya and Kiyonai Makoto father and son. In addition, there are the brothers Hidechi Anduchi and Hideaki YukiUchi, Genyuki Moriyama and Naoki Moriyama, Shigeyuki Muraoka and Mika Muraoka, brothers and sisters of Yoshida Andyoshi Yoshida, brothers and sisters of Shiko Yukihara and Masaaki Harihara, and the kinship relationship is really rich and colorful.
The most famous son of the Kansai Chess Academy inherited his father's business, which should belong to the three-nine steps of the ancestors of Theoichi Sekiyama (1909-1970) - Rio Sekiyama (1937-1992) - Sekiyama Toshido (1973-). In fact, Toshiichi Sekiyama's father, Sekiyama Shengli, is also a professional chess player. Two daughters of Toshiichi Sekiyama were married to Masayoshi Hashimoto and Masazo Kurahashi (1942-), and Masazo Kurahashi's son Masayuki Kurahashi (1972-) was promoted to Kurodan in 1999 at the Kansai Chess Academy. It is worth mentioning that Kurahashi Masazo's beloved disciple Tetsuya Kiyonai (1961-) took only ten years and three months from the first stage to the ninth section, which is the fastest full-scale ascension rate in Japan.
In his childhood, Hiroshi Mizuno (1936-2009), who had limited mobility due to polio, spent his life battling the disease, and after entering the stage at the age of twenty-three, he climbed to the apex of the professional chess player in a wheelchair at the age of forty-four. He loved popularization and taught apprenticeships, and two female Yakudan Yoshida Mika (1971-) and Kazuko Konishi (1972-) from the Kansai Chess Academy came from his disciples. His daughter Hiromi Mizuno (1976-) was also a Kansai Chess Academy godan player, and formed a family of professional chess players with Shingaki Taketake Kudan (1970-).
Hoshikawa Nobuaki Kudan (1951-2014) had three sons: Hoshikawa Aisheng (1980-), Hoshikawa Takumi (1983-), hoshikawa Hangyang (1989-), they successfully entered the dan in 2002, 2001, and 2006, respectively, and now the two younger brothers are four dans, and the older brother is still three dan, which makes people sigh that "there is no elder or child in the ascension section".
From the left, Hoshikawa Aisheng, Hoshikawa Takumi, Hoshikawa Hangyang, the appearance value is also the earliest into the section of the second is obviously prominent.
The young Watanabe Yujidan (1999-) and Watanabe Hiroyō Hatshinō (2002-) are the youngest brother professionals in the Kansai Chess Academy. At the beginning of 2020, the 29-year-old Export Wanlizi Chuduan and the 24-year-old Yoshinori Shintani's sister-brother relationship became a positive result, and they are the youngest professional chess player couple in the Kansai Chess Academy.
On February 22 this year, Wan Lizi posted wedding photos on personal social media.
For an organization, although there is a sense of closure in a small circle and inward development, the mutual support between relatives can bring cohesion and family warmth to the entire industry.