A little piece of tradition
Hyuga Kaya. Hyuga shell stones. Mulberry bowls.Only 60,000 Yen! What's the catch?
The wares on Kuroki Goishi Ten's site never cease to amaze me.
That set costing only 60,000 Yen is made of the highest-quality materials. What you're looking at is a magnificent piece of miniaturization that is roughly 4/10ths the normal size. The stones are only 9mm in diameter.
Image from Kuroki Goishi Ten.The above photograph shows stones with diameters of 12mm, 15mm, 17mm, 20mm, 21mm, and 21.9mm. You are left to imagine how much smaller the 9mm stones are.
You can use the links below to find sets for the following stone diameters:
A while back, Kuroki was offering these miniature Go sets which were only 10.5cm tall. They were priced at 18,000 Yen. The goban was made of Hyuga Kaya Masame, and the stones were made of Hyuga clam shell. The gosu bowls were made of Honkuwa.
Only five of these were produced and they have long since sold out. Below are the specs.
| Go board | Hyuga Kaya Masame (13.4 cm x 12.8cm, 10.5cm high, 6cm thick) |
| Go stones | 50 whites & 50 blacks, (8mm diameter, 4mm thick) |
| Gosu | Honkuwa (4.5cm diameter, 3cm height) |
Oh bother. 15K thanks to rank float on KGS.
Because I hadn't played many 19x19s on KGS lately, my rank was suffixed with a question mark. It took only three matches this evening to solidify it (two against GnuGo bots), but it settled at 15k.
That's 2-3 stones above where I think I should be. I'm probably going to find my next games to be ... challenging.
posted by ChiyoDad @ 12:03 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
After losing a frustrating game to "saswiz" on KGS I saw that you had just played and beaten him. I reviewed your game and enjoyed seeing how you won. You have surpassed me again. I am at 16 kyu.
hey! where did you find this info on the 4/10th miniature? seems wonderful!!
Hello John!
It's great to hear from you! We haven't played a game in a long while! I really appreciated your blog post on the climate-change project screensaver. I had downloaded it back in March.
Thanks for the compliment. I may have just been lucky. saswiz initiated a lot of contact plays which served only to strengthen my positions when I played according to fundamentals. I visualized a huge Takemiya-like moyo evolving in the center so I played towards that objective. Thereafter, it was just a matter of safe territorial reduction and safe defense.
Maybe reading Kageyama's book does help. I was reviewing his first three chapters before playing.
Hello Gregorio!
All of the miniatures can be found on those links that I had provided in the bulleted list. Just use Google's Language Tools to translate the pages.
The miniatures are all still available from Kuroki. An owner can now claim that they own a set of real Hyuga Kaya, Hyuga shell stones, and Mulberry bowls; it's just that they're all notably smaller than normal.
Thanks chiyodad!
In fact i own one the five 1/3 kaya miniatures from kuroki!!! but I find the new one fantastic. I'll go check the japanese language site!
Ooops, i didn't notice you provided links to the items!!! so sorry ^_^
By the way, these are not "so miniature". A real sized goban has stones of 22mm diameter... the miniature of stones of 15mm diameter is almost as big as the real one. Not so mini! :D
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