An exclusive interview with Hibiki Mishima 2-dan, the “too beautiful professional Go player” who has been the talk of the town on X!
I hope they won’t be disappointed.
At first, I was really afraid. I was happy, but I was more anxious at first.
She was modest, but the actual person who appeared at a Go salon in Tokyo was more beautiful than the “doctored” photo. Hibiki Mishima 2-dan, 23. She has been communicating in various ways, sometimes cosplaying as an anime or manga character, or playing Go with the emerald green sea of Okinawa in the background. We asked her why she uses SNS to communicate and what she plans to do in the future.
I started playing Go when I was around 5 years old. She happened to pass by a glass-walled Go class and saw children playing Go and thought it looked fun, but she does not remember it.
I started out playing once a week for about two hours, but I grew to like Go more and more, and when I was in the second grade of elementary school, I started playing Go six days a week. When I was in the second grade of elementary school, I started playing Go six days a week, because the children’s class was only open six days a week. If there had been seven days, I probably would have gone to all of them. From 4:30 or 5:00 after school to 9:00 at night. I had more friends at the Go class than at school, so it was a place I looked forward to going to. By the time I was in the fourth grade, I think I was thinking of becoming a professional. My father told me about it, but I don’t remember it,” said Mishima.
In junior high school, he became a graduate student aiming to become a professional as a matter of course, and he spent even more time immersed in Go. During his junior and senior high school years, he lived a hard adolescence in which his life depended on whether he could become a professional or not. Looking back on those days with no place to escape from Go, he says he was “sick,” and when he passed the professional level at the age of 18, he felt a great sense of “liberation.
In the paid version of “FRIDAY Subscription”, we take a candid look at her daily life after becoming a professional Go player, her cosplay on SNS, the true face of the Go world, which she describes as “a bunch of weirdos”, and the truth behind her sudden marriage at the age of 23.
Interview and writing： Hirohiko Tani Photographs ： Kazuhiko Nakamura