Visiting the other Kiin

Thursday was another free day. I already wrote the we had planed to visit the Kansai Kiin again. However someone proposed that we should take a look at the Kiin we did not knew so far. Therefore we decided to pay a visit to the Kansai branch of the Nihon Kiin. Please notice that we have NOT been to Tokyo. There is a Nihon Kiin building in Osaka, too. This was a very common misunderstanding. :-)

Navigating in Japan is kind of hard since you are not able to read many signs. Fortunately we had one American guy who speaks Japanese very fluently. Still, it took us about 20 minutes to find the right building which was actually very close to the station. We even frequently asked people for the way but missed the small Go Kanji when we where in front of the building the first time.

The Go salon was even larger than the Kansai Kiin one. We had to pay an entrance fee. Normally it is 1,200 Yen (9.24 Euro) each but we got an discount of 200.

Then we sat down and waited till the desk clerk found opponents for us. The Japanese ratings are 2 more stones higher than the American one so I became a Japanese 2-Dan. (At home I started as a 2 Kyu).

I played just one game since it took a while. He wanted me to take six handicap stones. So he was probably Japanese 8-Dan. He was actually pretty tough, as far as I can say, but I still managed to win. I think our overall score was quite good.

We were way below the age average there, as you can guess from the picture. However we were told that there are younger Go player, too, but they come mostly at the weekend.

The two much younger and less Japanese looking people are French participants of the Go Camp.

There were Go material and merchandise article again. I actually got the funny fan with cartoons of go professionals. I called Yuki Satoshi the popstar of Kansai Kiin, earlier. I don't know how one should describe Iyama Juta after seeing this statues...

Does anybody know the meaning of the bird like statue in the left???