I just noticed in the Pair Go World Championship starting tomorrow Xie Yimin is playing with Iyama Yuta for Japan.

http://www.pairgo.or.jp/pgwc/2017/index_e.htm

She's the best female player in Japan by all accounts I can find, and was born in Taiwan, but I haven't found anything about her changing citizenship. I assume she's naturalized Japanese, but am casually curious about when she changed and why. I recall reading somewhere that Go Seigen was more or less forced to change his citizenship in order to continue competing, but that was quite a long time ago. There was once also the expectation that yokozuna hold Japanese citizenship...

Of course it's none of my business...

A year or two ago yes, but recently Fujisawa Rina has a decent claim to challenge that title: she ended Xie's 9-year run in the Women's Miejin in 2017 and also took the 2016 Women's Honinbo. Rina is also higher ranked on goratings.org now (and the highest ranked female Japanese pro).

Awesome! I'm very much looking forward to the pair go this weekend.

I do not know if Xie Yimin changed her nationality, but sometimes international competition allows players to group together according to their affiliation not their nationality. This could be because she is affiliated with Nihon ki-in.

By the way, on the website, Park Jung Hwan and Choi Jung listed as representatives of CHINA is definitely a mistake.

Was just looking at that. They sound like very Korean names to me.

The website graphic is in error. The actual match details are all correct.

Is anyone watching the live broadcast? The website doesn't show any kind of stream when I check it. It's currently 2pm in Japan on August 12th.

The first match has already ended:

To watch the second which starts in ~40 minutes, open GoPanda2 client, log in. Then in your web browser go here: http://www.pairgo.or.jp/pgwc/2017/results/index_e.htm

and click Live Broadcast. It will open a game room in your GoPanda2 browser.

There may be video streams elsewhere. That's only the kifu obviously.

I see. I was "watching" from the Pandanet app on my phone last night. I wasn't sure if there was a video stream, because "live broadcast" sounds like a video stream to me. Still fun to watch either way.