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...
Drew wrote:She's the best female player in Japan by all accounts I can find
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).
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.
Fadedsun wrote: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.
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.
