GO FOR BLIND PEOPLE

WITH EVERY PIECE IDENTICAL in size and shape - and there are lots of them! - go might not seem the ideal game for blind people to tackle. But they already have a hugely impressive track record of overcoming such challenges, and this is one they have yet again taken in their stride. The top players are already at amateur dan level.

The second National Tournament for the Visually Impaired was held at the Konishi Hall in Osaka in summer 1999 under the auspices of the Japanese Society for the Dissemination of Go to the Visually Impaired (Nihon Shikaku Shogai Igo Fukkyukai). It attracted 80 players, despite heavy rain which, apparently, was a major handicap to blind people travelling. Players in blind schools in the far south of Japan were also able to play through PC and video-conferencing links.

At least 9 blind schools and 17 welfare centres throughout Japan are actively playing go at present, though in each case it depends strictly on volunteers.

Go has been played for a long time by blind players in Japan, but it is only recently that tournaments have come to the fore. The first began about 1995. The development of tournament go has also led to the standardisation and larger scale production of equipment.

The equipment now used is a thin plastic board of two layers stuck together. The bottom layer is a base and the top layer is perforated with a grid of 9x9 holes. Each hole is a little under 3 cm in diameter, with about 4 mm between holes. The depth of the holes is about 1.5 mm. The border is about 3 cm wide, so that the entire board is about 32 cm square. The centre hole is also marked with small 4 mm perforations at the four "corners" of the centre hole.

I have seen two versions of this board. In one there are no markings connecting the holes (the equivalent of the intersections on a real go board), and in the other they are marked. In the latter case small 5 mm holes are added to the border, at the four corners and at the four mid-side points. There is presumably still some experimentation going on, but the latter type is the one used in the recent tournament.

The pieces are plastic discs that fit snugly in the holes, but without being a push fit. They are about 3 mm high, so stand slightly proud when placed in a hole. They are coloured black or white, but the white pieces also have a centre perforation of about 5 mm diameter. The Japanese genius for ergonomic design appears to have surfaced again.

The players sit opposite each other as in normal go, with the board on a table in tournament play. They can freely feel the stones, though obviously some players have partial vision and the large discs help them in this respect too. When they make a move, they place the disc in the appropriate hole and also announce its grid location (in the Japanese fashion, e.g. 2-no-4).

Most of the players are young (the girls are well represented), since schools provide the core of the support, but the Society has plans to contact more welfare centres.

There is a famous story from ancient China, well known also in Japan, about one of the earliest go masters. Forced to flee with the emperor he served in the face of a Tatar invasion (the An Lushan rebellion of 755), he ended up one night at a hut occupied by an old lady and her daughter-in-law.

As he settled down to sleep on the veranda, he heard the pair play blind go in bed by calling out the moves to each other. The master, Wang Jixin (Wang the Firewood Collector), was awestruck by the quality of the moves and asked the old lady for instruction. On his return to the capital, he was able to use his new knowledge to devastating effect.

Perhaps the blind players of modern Japan can similarly provide inspiration to their fellow games players.