In 1922, this "relay game" was played: http://ps.waltheri.net/database/game/42324/ (I'll be honest, I'm not even sure what a relay game is).

Each side had four players. The leader of the black team was the famous Kubomatsu Katsukiyo, and the leader of the white team was the even more illustrious Honinbo Shusai.

The second players of both teams were at least known, if not well: Yoshida Misako and Fujita Toyojiro.

But there were four more players involved: according to Waltheri, they were Harima Kisaburo and Taniguchi Fusazo for the black team and Nakagawa Masako and Narukami Magoshichi for the white team.

None of Harima, Taniguchi, Nakagawa and Narukami have Sensei's Library articles. I don't have GoGoD.

Does anyone have more information on these players?

Ah, I was just searching for Taniguchi Fusazo and I saw that, at the time of the game, a man by that name was President of the Osaka Associated Cotton Spinning company.

Now I understand: the four extra players were corporate bigwigs from the Japanese business world, who bought their way in.

That makes perfect sense.

Right, they were not professionals. If they were professional players they would be in the GoGoD onomasticon. The GoGoD game comments lets you know they were amateurs. I don't know if they were businessmen or what, but the game was played as a Spa so that's the reason they are playing together. "Relay" is just rengo -- the players on a team take turns playing moves of the same game. GoGoD suggests that the order of moves is reverse from the listing (amateurs first).

Anyway, it's nice to have GoGoD to look up this stuff. The onomasticon also has promotion dates and other information not on senseis or wikipedia. And the game notes are often helpful as here.

And one nice thing about ye olde GoGoD is that there's no subscription fee.

Thanks for the extra information.

It's not "according to Waltheri" - it's according to GoGoD. T Mark Hall transcribed all the moves in that file and I wrote all the words there, except that Waltheri mistakenly has Misako instead of Misaoko [よしだみさをこ]. (She was what might be called the Sumire of Meiji times.)

We gave Waltheri permission to use LOTS of our old games, on a noblesse oblige basis but for pattern searching only. There are restrictions on downloads but without looking it up in Mark's papers, I can't remember what.



Yes.



That's a gratuitous slur. Taniguchi, in particular, is ultimately the reason we had the Toyota & Denso Cup. And since was also a founding director of the Nihon Ki-in, he served go for decades - rather longer than SL editors, and with more substance. He and the men like him also acted out of noblesse oblige, though on a MUCH grander scale. It was the go players who sponged on them.