The Ear Reddening Game

September 1846. Osaka, Japan. A seventeen-year-old prodigy sat down to play the head of the Inoue house in one of the most celebrated games ever recorded. The teenager was Kuwahara Shusaku, not yet Honinbo, but already a 4-dan of startling strength. His opponent was Inoue Gennan Inseki, an established 8-dan in his late forties and patriarch of one of Japan's four great go houses. The game they played over three days in September 1846 would become known forever as the Ear-Reddening Game (耳赤の一局, Mimiaka no Ikkyoku): 325 moves, no komi, Black wins by two points, and one move at the centre of the board that changed the course of go history.

Shusaku's Return from the Provinces

Shusaku had spent the previous eighteen months training on Innoshima Island, near Onomichi, away from the pressures of Edo. He returned to the capital in July 1846 a sharper, more mature player. When he met Gennan Inseki that summer, the two first played a game with a two-stone handicap. Shusaku's strength quickly overwhelmed the advantage; Gennan, recognising he had no hope of winning, suspended the game without finishing it. Impressed but unconvinced, he arranged a second encounter on even terms: Shusaku taking Black without handicap. That rematch was played in Osaka the following month, across three sessions on 11, 14, and 15 September 1846. Each day was hosted at a different patron's residence: the first at Tsuji Chujiro's home in Tennoji (play ended after move 89), the second at Gensai Ichiro's residence (where the famous move would be played), and the third at a go meeting organised by Nakagawa Junsetsu at the home of Nakanoshima Kamiya. Under the customs of the era, play was adjourned on White's move, and White chose when each session resumed.

Gennan's Taisha Trap

Gennan opened with the taisha joseki in the lower right, a complex, five-way fighting formation that was his favourite weapon and one he had helped develop. He deployed a variation that had only entered the historical record months earlier, a sequence designed to catch an opponent unfamiliar with its secrets. Shusaku, facing it for the first time, played move 25 in a way modern reference works regard as a mistake: Black should have slid to a safer point rather than extending as he did. Gennan must have felt the game was his when he saw that reply. The taisha fight that followed concluded favourably for White; by move 63, Black had lost the advantage of the first move.

For much of the opening and middle game, Gennan's play was superb. Commentators have called the first half of this game a masterpiece for White. Shusaku, however, kept fighting: patient, thick, refusing to collapse under pressure.

Move 127: The Ear-Reddening Move

On the second day, at Gensai Ichiro's residence, the position reached a critical junction. White had just played move 126, threatening to link up and consolidate while attacking Black's weak central stones. Shusaku answered with move 127, a move at the central point of attack and defence that would make this game immortal.

In an adjoining room, Nakagawa Junsetsu and several of Gennan's disciples, together with local go enthusiasts, were replaying and analysing the position. Not one of the professionals present doubted that Gennan was winning. But a doctor who had been watching the game directly offered a different prediction. Pressed to explain, he said: "I don't know much about go, but when Shusaku played, Gennan's ears flushed red. This is a sign that he had been upset. This move must have taken him by surprise."

The move worked in four directions at once: it lightly parried White's attack at 126, offered assistance to four endangered black stones below, expanded Black's framework at the top, reduced the influence of White's thickness on the right, and eyed an invasion or reduction of White's position on the left. In retrospect, commentators from Miyamoto Naoki to John Power have identified it as the game's turning point, the moment the initiative gradually shifted from Gennan's hands to Shusaku's.

The Desperate Endgame

Shusaku did not seize an immediate lead; the game remained extraordinarily close in a no-komi era where every point counted. But from move 127 onward, Black slowly wrested control. Entering the endgame, Gennan, perhaps stung by the reversal of a game he had dominated, opened a ko fight from move 229 that he could not realistically hope to win. He persisted in that ko through move 311 anyway, a stubbornness that John Power, in Invincible: The Games of Shusaku, reads as evidence of his mortification at losing a game he had commanded for so long.

After 325 moves, Shusaku won by two points. Gennan Inseki, one of the strongest players of his generation, had been defeated by a teenager on even terms.

Aftermath and Legacy

When Shusaku returned to Edo, his performance, especially in this game, secured his future. He was promoted to 5-dan and designated heir to the Honinbo house, the path that would eventually make him the greatest player of the late Edo period. Gennan Inseki remained a central figure in the Inoue house until his death in 1859; the Ear-Reddening Game stands as the defining encounter between their generations.

The game has never left the go canon. It appears in John Power's Invincible, in Miyamoto Naoki's classic commentary, and in Sensei's Library. It even surfaces in popular culture: Hikaru Shindo studies this kifu in Hikaru no Go. Modern AI analysis offers a more nuanced verdict: strong engines often prefer a push on the upper left to move 127, and professionals such as Yoda Norimoto have noted that similar central moves are within the reach of any first-class player. Yet the story of the doctor, the flushed ears, and the teenager who would not yield endures, not because one stone was supernatural, but because it captured, in a single moment, the shock of genius recognised too late.

Primary sources for this account include John Power, Invincible: The Games of Shusaku (Ishi Press, 1982); commentary by Miyamoto Naoki 9-dan; and historical records preserved on Sensei's Library and in GoGoD.