Hanami 2006: Matsumae

The best of the bunch. Matsumae, the site of the only real stone castle in Hokkaido built to withstand cannon assaults and named after the pre-eminent clan that led the settling of Hokkaido. Also home to a huge variety of cherry blossoms, with something like a hundred varieties, including green blossoms!

The last picture shows what hanami is really all about. Blue tarps, plentiful food, sake, beer and good cheer.

RISING reverses common sense.

This monolithic structure was an abandoned supermarket when I arrived, but with the addition of a multi-storey car park and a makeover it's become the Japanese version of an entertainment centre.

Upon walking through the doors you are assailed by a wall of sound, a deafening cacophony which can only mean one thing - a pachinko parlour. This is the insanely popular art of feeding thousands of ball-bearings into a machine and watching them bounce down in the hopes of scoring prizes. The empty seat you see here is an anomaly that lasted only a few seconds... dozens of people were waiting for spaces to open up, despite the entire floor being covered with identical machines.

Given that this is an entirely new structure, and that it's name is supposed to be an acronym, you would have expected that a little English-checking at the planning stage wouldn't have gone amiss... I have a feeling that since it got through a spell-checker it was deemed correct!

Go!

 
I finally plucked up the courage and entered a local Go club, only to find no-one there! A bit of shouting summoned the talkative old lady who runs the place and professes to know nothing of the game, who then called up a guy to play me, despite my protestations...

A bit of background on the rankings: Fresh players (me!) start around 30-25 kyuu, and quickly work their way up to 10 kyuu-ish, more slowly to 1 kyuu, then it flips over and you start at amateur 1 dan and crawl up to 7 dan. Roughly speaking, for every difference in rank you are entitled to place one handicap stone on the board, to a maximum of 9 in a pre-set pattern. Professionals have a separate dan ranking from 1 to 9, where 1 is roughly equivalent to a 7 dan amateur.

Needless to say, in my first ever game on a full-sized board Yoshio, a 5-dan player and the guy with more hair, whupped my butt good, despite my 9 stone handicap. My second ever game against the other guy I lost by a mere 26.5 points with an 8 stone handicap. I was very proud, and somewhat shocked, that I managed to force the game to be played through to a final count.

Yoshio was quite effusive with his praise, if I understood him correctly, and showed me some Joseki opening moves and some fundamental differences between playing on a small and a real board. He expects I can hit 5 kyuu in time.

In the game you see here Yoshio (white) won quite handily against the other guy I played after a protracted fight in the centre.