Hon'inbō Sansa
go player, founder of the prestigious Hon'inbō school
Hon'inbō Sansa (本因坊 算砂, 1559 – June 13, 1623) was the assumed name of Kanō Yosaburō (加納 與三郎), one of the strongest Japanese Go players of the Edo period (1603–1867), and founder of the house of Hon'inbō, first among the four great schools of Go in Japan. He was a Buddhist priest of the Nichiren sect, and his original dharma name was Nikkai (日海).
Life and career
Nikkai was born in Kyōto and became a monk at age nine. The name "Hon'inbō", (originally pronounced "Honninbō"), comes from a sub-temple of the Jakkōji temple complex in Kyōto where Nikkai, the first "Hon'inbō", resided.
Among his students were the daimyōs Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the three great "unifiers" of feudal Japan. Nikkai considered the three generals to be "fifth-degree" players (五子, comparable to amateur 4 or 5 dan), but "diplomacy" was likely a factor in Nikkai's even-handed assessment of these imposing figures.
It was Nobunaga who, in 1578, recognized twenty-year-old Nikkai as the first Meijin of Go. In 1582, Nikkai, at the behest of Nobunaga, was involved in a notorious game at the Honnōji Temple against his rival, another Nichiren priest, Kashio Rigen (鹿塩 利玄 b. 1565). (Apparently, there is a theory that "Kashio" and "Rigen" were two different people.
“Hon'inbō Sansa” enters the record as go player, founder of the prestigious Hon'inbō school. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hon'inbō, Sansa and player can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Hon'inbō Sansa” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hon'inbō, Sansa and player provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2656780. VIAF identifies the subject as 257877770. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1559, 1623, 1603 and 1867.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hon'inbō Sansa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.