The history and evolution of kyu rank in Go game

[claire_yang]

Months ago, when I started to trace back the most extensive list with almost 5000 players published in 1908 (明治41年)

The history and evolution of kyu rank in Go game

While I was researching the early 1900s Go players all across Japan, I found this very interesting list [日本全国囲碁段級人名録 明治41年 1908 - page01] [日本全国囲碁段級人名録 明治41年 1908 - page02] Notice the people circled in red Inukai Tsuyoshi (犬養 毅) and Toyama Mitsuru (頭山 満), the first one Inukai Tsuyoshi was a cabinet minister at the time, and later Prime Minister of Japan (where his death by assassination indirectly lead to the progress of War World II in East Asia), and the second one Toyama Mitsuru was a key…

https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/780107

I successfully traced it back to older documents like this, published a year before it at 1907 (明治40年)

Or this, published 2 years before at 1906 (明治39年)

With even older documents like this at 1901 (明治34年)

Or decades before at 1892 (明治25年)

Or like this with no date information, but based on known players on the list already passed away before the 1890s, should be around the 1860s to 1880s

When I dug deeper and further in time in the amateur Go world in the late 19th century, I realized that it is simply impossible to trace thousands and thousands of people who mostly didn’t leave records in history. I need a different approach to get an overall view of who they were, how they lived, and how in general people learned to play Go at the time.

Some time during the summer vacation, I chatted and talked with one of my friends who know economic history that deal with activities and groups of people in the past, and they gave me the idea of analyzing quantitative data to better understand the context of the era instead of investigating individual person’s activities. So I began to ask some very fundamental questions:

1. What was the population of Go players in the late 19th century to early 20th century and how did they change over the decades

2. How did amateur players learn Go at the time, and who could afford to play? Can someone be self-taught without a teacher?

3. What were the local activities like Go clubs and conventions during that time, and who would participate in them, and what were their interactions with other organizations. And how did they participate in economic activities (how did they earn their income, their cost of livings, how easy for them to travel, and to buy materials, such as a set of Go stones, gobans, magazines, and newspapers, etc.)

My grand journal of trying to dig up the origin of kyu rank, now became a journey of understanding how Go players lived, learned, paid, and played in the late 19th to the early 20th century.