Hon'inbō Sansa
| Honinbo Sansa | |
|---|---|
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| Full name | Honinbo Sansa |
| Kanji | 本因坊算砂 |
| Born | 1559 Kyoto, Japan |
| Died | June 13, 1623 Edo, Japan |
| Teacher | Senya |
| Rank | 9 dan |
Hon'inbō Sansa (本因坊算砂, 1559 – June 13, 1623) was the assumed name of Kanō Yosaburō (加納 與三郎), one of the strongest Japanese Go players of the Edo period (1603–1867), and founder of the house of Hon'inbō, first among the four great schools of Go in Japan. He was a Buddhist priest of the Nichiren sect, and his original dharma name was Nikkai (日海).
Nikkai was born in Kyōto and became a monk at age nine. The name "Hon'inbō", (originally pronounced "Honninbō"), comes from a sub-temple of the Jakkōji temple complex in Kyōto where Nikkai, the first "Hon'inbō", resided.
Among his students were the daimyōs Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the three great "unifiers" of feudal Japan. Nikkai considered the three generals to be "fifth-degree" players (五子, comparable to amateur 4 or 5 dan), but "diplomacy" was likely a factor in Nikkai's even-handed assessment of these imposing figures.
It was the Shogun Nobunaga who, in 1578, recognized twenty-year-old Nikkai as the first Meijin of Go. In 1582, Nikkai, at the behest of Nobunaga, was involved in a notorious game at the Honnōji Temple against his rival, another Nichiren priest, Kashio Rigen (鹿塩 利玄 b. 1565). (Apparently, there is a theory that "Kashio" and "Rigen" were two different people. See the Japanese version of this article.) The game is traditionally held to have taken place on the eve of the treacherous Incident at Honnōji, (in which Nobunaga was forced to commit seppuku), and is said to have ended in a "triple ko". Hence the notion of triple ko as bad omen. There is a game record, but typical for the period, it is incomplete. The triple ko may have occurred, somewhat implausibly, in unrecorded remaining plays, or in another game that day, but in the end, there is no evidence that this is more than a good story.
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