EARLY OTEAI
The Nihon Ki-in was formed in April 1924. The impetus was the Kanto Earthquake for it made professionals realise they had to band together to survive. They were fortunate to have the help of Baron Okura Kishichiro. He invested 100,000 yen in a newly built 200-tsubo hall in Tamaike, Akasaka (burnt down in World War II; 1 tsubo = approx. 4 square yards/metres), and up to 1937 he supported it with 1000 yen a month - enough to allow professionals a salary of 10 yen per dan per month.
The first president was Makino Nobuaki, himself a great go patron. A politician and diplomat (including spells as ambassador to Italy and foreign minister) he eventually became Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. It was he who recruited Okura to the cause as his Vice-President. Okura, who also enjoyed a formative period abroad - he was educated at Cambridge University - had just taken over running the Okura-gumi, a wealthy industrial combine set up by his father during the Meiji Restoration.
Apart from the Inoue faction in Osaka and Nozawa Chikucho, all pros joined the fledgling Nihon Ki-in, including Shusai's Honinbo school and the Hoensha players under Iwasa Kei. There was a brief breakaway when Kiseisha was formed by Karigane Jun'ichi (Shusai's main rival) but most had returned within two years.
One of the Nihon Ki-in's first innovations was the Joshiki Teai (fixed official games; also read Teishiki Teai), which were to be played twice a month.
Games before then were virtually o-konomi (grace and favour games), with no time limits. Many games were as much a test of stamina as go strength. The record was a game between Segoe Kensaku and Kogishi Soji which spanned 20 days in nine sessions in the Yorozu Choho's Win-and-Continue tournament (the three main slowcoaches were Shusai, Suzuki and Kogishi). Fees were then 12 yen 50 sen - at modern rates about 120,000 yen. Games between individuals were on the traditional uchikomi basis, under which the handicap was adjusted if one side was four wins ahead.
A change for the (potentially) all-play-all format of the Nihon Ki-in was needed, and Honinbo Shusai proposed that all past results under the uchikomi system should be cancelled. This initially met much opposition, along with another proposed change: the difference between dans to be changed from half a stone per dan to one third. This was meant to favour the stronger players. A 9-dan would now only have to give three stones to a 1-dan, not four.
The changes prevailed and the first game under the new joshiki teai system began on 1924-07-23. The rules were:
- All pros must play two games a month
- Time limits to be used, with 6 hours each as the base, 8 hours for 5-dan to 7-dan and 20 hours for Vice-Meijin and Meijin.
But there were no clear rules for promotion. The regulations simply said:
"A review meeting shall be held twice each month and shall determine promotions of the members of the Ki-in on the basis mainly of the results of the joshiki teai games in the Ki-in in the previous year".
The lack of movement this engendered made the event stale and a feeling for change very soon grew. The newspapers in particular wanted to be inventive, and events such as the Suzuki-Nozawa match and, in particular, the match between the Nihon Ki-in and Kiseisha that had begun in 1926 had sponsors and public in their thrall.
In a highly calculated move, the Joshiki Teai system was therefore abolished in Spring 1927 and replaced by the Oteai. The calculation included jumping on the bandwagon of sumo's success. It was a golden age of popular sumo with the Grand Champions Tsune-no-hana, Miyagiyama and Nishi-no-umi III enjoying acclaim. The nationalist spirit was abroad, and inasmuch as sumo was seen as the traditional body sport of Japan, so go was now seen as its traditional mind sport.
Like O-sumo, the Oteai was to have two main sessions, Spring and Autumn. The name was deliberately derivative, populist even (actually the formal name of the Oteai to this day is still Joshiki Teai). The creed of the new system was that these Nihon Ki-in games were to be the only games that really counted, through being the only ones counting towards promotion. Each session was to last for two months and newspaper games were to be played only in between. In other words, newspaper games were banned during the Oteai period, though needless to say this rule was not enforced rigorously.
Players were divided like sumo wrestlers into East and West teams, and like sumo they styled themselves the Kokugi-kan, the repository of the "national" game. The games were also nicknamed Showa Castle Games and were published in Asahi Shinbun, who continued to sponsor the event until 1961.
Within each team players were also allocated to groups according to grade. Group A (ko) were mainly those of 3-dan and above. Group B (otsu) were 2-dans and below, including students.
The East-West division was broadly along the lines of grouping masters with pupils but some placings were also made simply to try to achieve balance of strength between the two teams. Furthermore, within each group players were ranked according to grade, or according to results in the case of equal grades, and the whole corpus of players was then pasted up on a traditional banzuke or ranking list so familiar in the sumo contests. This was far from a novelty in the go world, but it was definitely a harking back to a glorious past.
The first Oteai began on 6 April 1927 and ended on 25 May. The first banzuke was as shown in this table. top two rows under East and West were Group A (ko) players. The third row was Group B (otsu) and the bottom row were YP: young professionals - what would be called insei today. East ranked higher than West, but there was no geographical significance in the team's names - they referred only to the entrances made into the sumo ring.
The equivalent of sumo's yokozuna (grand champions) were thus Suzuki and Segoe, and their match was naturally arranged to be the last of the session.
