Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) is the title of the fourth act of the play Gion Sairei Shinkoki, written for the puppet theater by Asada Itcho and Nakamura Akei in 1757 and adapted for kabuki a year later. This act is still performed in theaters in Japan, and the fact that two games of go are played in it gives it a special interest for us.

The fourth scene of the fourth act is laid in and around the famous Golden Pavilion, built by the third Ashikaga Shogun, which still stands today in the northwest part of Kyoto. In the play it is being occupied by Matsunaga Daizen (1510-1577), the treacherous governor of Kyoto who, to further his schemes, is keeping the aged mother of the lately deceased thirteenth Shogun imprisoned in an upper room.

The scene begins with Daizen and his younger brother playing a game of go and discussing their plots. A young man named Tokichi is led in, bound with a rope, by a servant who says he found him lurking outside the walls. Tokichi declares that he simply wants to enter Daizen's service (later we discover that he is an Ashikaga loyalist and is secretly trying to rescue the Shogun's mother). Daizen orders his bonds removed and then, to test his mental powers, challenges him to a game of go. During this game, played out move by move with constantly mounting tension, the plot thickens. On another part of the stage we see Yukihime, a lovely young woman whose husband is also being kept a prisoner by Daizen. She is in a state of mental agony because Daizen, whom she loathes, has demanded that she become his mistress if she wants her husband to regain his freedom.

Tokichi wins the game and Daizen is annoyed. The young man offers to play again, but this time Daizen devises a more difficult test. He throws one of the go bowls into a well in the garden and commands Tokichi to retrieve it without wetting his hands. Tokichi rises to the challenge with a neat trick. He finds a hollow bamboo pole and uses it to divert water from a nearby waterfall into the well, thus filling it so that the bowl floats to the top. He slides his fan under it, transfers it to an inverted go board (in order not to mar the surface) and presents it to Daizen, who this time is delighted at his quick wit and admits him into service. After further complications the act comes to an end with the Shogun's mother rescued and both Yukihime and her husband freed.

An interesting point about this drama is that Edo theatergoers correctly recognized Tokichi as being none other than the young Toyotomi Hideyoshi in disguise, whose boyhood name was Tokichiro and who was involved, with Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu, in the destruction of the Ashikaga Shogunate. Hideyoshi's well-known love of go may have been what prompted the playwrights to weave this game so effectively into the plot.

Hideyoshi's teacher in go was a monk of the Nichiren sect named Nikkai, considered to be the strongest player in the country. Both Hideyoshi and his great companion-in-arms Oda Nobunaga received instruction from Nikkai, each taking a five-stone handicap. He was awarded the title of Meijin (Master) by Nobunaga and later took the name Honinbo Sansa, becoming the founding director of the Go Bureau when it was established in 1612 in Edo by order of the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns. He thus inaugurated the celebrated line of hereditary Honinbos which continued until the retirement of Shusai, the 21st in the line, in 1938. The Meijin and Honinbo titles are now won in open competition each among Japanese professional players.