The Making of Greatness, Part 2
The Making of Greatness, Part 2
Many moons ago, I wrote Part 1 of this series, examining the life of Hikaru Shindo, prototypical shounen protagonist of Hikaru no Go, and the extraordinary circumstances he was gifted with. Inspired by the sociological lens of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I looked closely at factors in his surroundings that might have conferred competitive advantages. I identified a teacher of infinite Go knowledge, elite peers to push his skills, a community that provides a wealth of avenues and rewards for his passion, and the sheer volume of meaningful practice time available as important pillars to Hikaru path on Go preeminence.
Sorrow-kun: 5 months late?! GTFO!
Now I’ll present a few important interactions outside of game matches that aided Hikaru’s development; social connections as valuable as the best strategies and rigorous practice. To what degree were his parents and teachers involved in his passion? How did he learn about and apply to the high profile Insei program? What special help enabled him to participate in those elite classes? And most importantly, how much of any of this was within the boy’s control? Parenting and unlikely coincidences are also important components to the picture of success, and I’ll show how dumb luck and the whimsy of strangers put Hikaru in the fast lane to greatness. (Again, some MINOR SPOILERS about early developments in the anime, nothing ruinous but fair warning nonetheless)
The Effect of Parenting
You can’t pick your parents, which is too bad because they are vitally important contributors to what makes you who you are: looks, heath, and intelligence are some of the key factors determined greatly by genetics. However beyond the nitty-gritty of DNA and RNA, they make other life-shaping decisions whose consequences we must inherit: the condition and location of home, socioeconomic status, and the lessons and skills emphasized by parenting. In academia, parenting styles are categorized into two camps: Concerted Cultivation and Natural Growth. To avoid sounding like a rehash of your college introductory sociology class, the key points boil down to essentially:
- Concerted Cultivation parents organize their children’s free time activities and teach them to question authority figures.
- Natural Growth parents let kids determine how to spend their own free time and teach them to be obedient of the rules.
- Contemporary child rearing styles fall somewhere along the gradient between those two styles.
- Concerted Cultivation develops more advantageous social skills in modern society than Natural Growth.
The thing is… the anime shows that the Shindo parents are textbook practitioners of natural growth.
Is it good or bad that this is the most we get to see of Hikaru's dad?
Hikaru’s father is largely absent and on the rare occasions we get to see his mother she’s always in the kitchen. They provide for all his basic needs: a stable home, healthy food, emotional support, and money. They know he loves Go and sign off on the release forms to enroll him as Insei. Yet otherwise, they leave him to his own devices. We don’t see them:
- check his homework or grades
- take him to museums or lengthy overseas trips
- make him go to cram school in the evening
- inquire about where he’s going every evening and weekend
- or (heaven forbid!) insist that he’s playing too much Go
Usually involved parents impart numerous cultural and social benefits to a child’s life. But as it relates to Go these activities would only interfere with Hikaru and Sai’s practice time, precious hours they use to study and improve strategies. In Hikaru’s unique circumstances, natural growth parenting works in his favor and becomes one of those hidden environmental advantages.
The Importance of Friends in High Places
Imagine this scenario: you play a sport or competitive game as part of your school club and on your day off you bump into a player of a rival school. He’s a senior and their team captain while you’re a lowly freshman, and your relationship with him is nonexistent outside of competing in occasional intramural events; you only barely recognize his name. What would happen? You might recognize each other, probably exchange polite how-do-you-dos, and possibly even make friendly (or not so friendly) taunts, and then be on your way.
But this is what happened to Hikaru: the Kaio Middle School’s Go team captain (school where Hikaru’s rival Akira attends) saw Hikaru at a book store and invited him to a game of Go. He made an assessment of our the boy’s skills and then informed him about the Insei school, a program for serious-minded players hoping to hone their talent into professional careers. And oh guess what, the once-per-year Insei application deadline was a month away and urged Hikaru to apply before he falls too far behind Akira. Here is a near-stranger who has only heard of Hikaru through reputation, going out of his way to sit down with him and suggest the next step for his improvement.
But Hikaru’s fortuitous luck doesn’t end there. He’s still late to apply, and the councilor also notes some missing requirements, most important of which was a professional player/teacher’s endorsement. Dead end, right? Of course not. Just then Ogata-sensei, professional 9-dan (the highest non-unique pro rank achievable), happened to pass by, recognized Hikaru from some tournament Hikaru didn’t even play in, and endorsed the boy just because he liked him. The weight of his endorsement bulldozed the way for Hikaru into the program, even despite lacking the ideal skill level.
Sometimes it takes just a few words from the right person.
In Conclusion (?)
Luck. Chance. Karma. Destiny. It goes by different names, but emergent opportunity is a crucial ingredient to the recipe for the sort of exceptional professional success we idolize and dream about. What if Hikaru Shindo went to the bookstore on a different day? What if he turned in his Insei application just an hour earlier or later? What if his parents pushed him to play a sport or instrument? We can’t say for sure how his life would have been different had any one of these variables changed, but we do see how all of them, plus the factors from part 1, had to line up just right for Hikaru to end up on the super-accelerated path of Go.
In summary: familial circumstances and events of pure chance, two major elements outside of an individual’s control, are also two major elements to the making of individual greatness. I’ll leave you with the the one big questions left: If everything in his environment conspired to make Hikaru a transcendence 12-year-old Go player, what did he do individually to contribute to his own greatness? Is there anything special about him? Hopefully I’ll get around to answering that before another 5 months! :3
Further Reading:
- Shinmaru highlights the character we overlook in greatness through Hachimaki of Planetes
- ghostlightning discusses how Goliaths (greats) are disguised as Davids in sports narratives
What a timely essay, as my wife and I have for the past 5 or so years been discussing parenting on the theoretical level. Now things have gotten quite real as our daughter just turned a year old and here’s what comes up:
She’s the professional (lawyer), I’m the entrepreneur; we fall on opposite regions (not extremes) of the gradient in your parenting binary…
…Until in practice, where she is surprisingly far more likely to indulge and spoil as I am far more likely to just let the thing cry than acquiesce to her demands.
My idea of cultivation is to keep throwing her into activities but let her stick to what she shows natural talent for (and talent that is also obvious due to interest). As much as I’d like her to be a tennis star, I won’t discourage her from ballet or whatever thing whose training goes against tennis-specific preparation.
But the fundamentals for me are very clear: sports (and athleticism) are of equal development importance as academics. The wife does not agree L00L.
Having said that, neither of us would be too excited if she becomes a genius in some obscure Japanese game like go.
It’s intersting how anime chooses to portray nurture in general. Usually shows like to introduce dysfunctional families (or parents in foreign countries), but Hikaru no Go bucks the trend by going with a very standard family.
Ooh, there’s going to be a part three. Very interesting. (Between you and Shadowmage, you guys make me look like I’m some sort of ogre.
)
@ghostlightning
Not a parent, so the dilemma is obviously much more tangible for you than it is for me, but my opinion is that participation in sport or athletics or any extra-curricular activity is infinitely more important than being competitive at it. I never excelled at sports as a kid, but I learned so much and got so much joy out of participating in a variety of different sports and extra-curricular activities.
@ghostlightning
Well, I’d be happy with whatever sparks her creative interest as long as it isn’t obscure Japanese comics and cartoons!
But really, I’m with Sorrow-kun in that (team) sports are most important because mere participation fosters skills in socialization and teamwork that are often neglected in pure academics. The chances she grows up to be a famous tennis superstar are small, but learning to exert one’s body and mind for a worthy cause will serve her in every aspect of her life. I guess you can chalk our values up to the western notion that kids should be raised as well-rounded individuals, even if that might put them behind those whose parents push them to specialize in just one thing.
@Shadowmage
I think its more common in shounen and shoujo series aimed at younger demographics (Hikaru no Go being an example) for the nuclear family to be pretty normal. That way the average viewer has more in common with the protagonist and is more likely to identify with him/her. For an older crowd, they want to get away from their parents as much as possible, so anime for teens would eschew as all parental presence.
Thanks guys, I have overlooked team sports. I played a lot of casual basketball back when I was a teenager, and I think it was a great thing to do. Having a daughter it didn’t occur to me so much, since I find it difficult to watch the WNBA.
But yeah, volleyball is pretty awesome here at the school level so that’s something.
It doesn’t occur to me as a completely Western thing to want to be well-rounded. Rather, it’s more of a class thing: aristocrats, children of merchants, etc. internationally have indulged in arts, scholarship, and physical activity (dueling for Europeans, reversely similar to Tokugawa era Samurai who work on arts and crafts).
Poorer people tend to hyperspecialize in the apprenticeship of their artisan/craftsmen parents: smiths, coopers, tanners, etc. (Common Western names, none of which suggest aristocracy or bourgeoisie).
Interesting discussion. I look forward to the next part.
About the last question, does the willingness to be selfish enough and sacrifice a great deal for it count as Hikaru’s personal contribution to his phenomenal development as a Go player? I think the most weighty sacrifice Hikaru has to make is his connections to non-Go part of society and his obligation to acknowledge the fact that his advance in Go may negatively affect other people. Once walking on the path of Go, Hikaru lost in touch with his school life, his friends at school, even Akari, his childhood friend. Hikaru angst very little about this point because it’s something he is serious about. However, there is still one occasion (when he just passes the pro exam, I think) where he sits lonely outside the room of his Go club listening to his friends having fun inside (Sai is conspicuously absent in this scene). The scene is accentuated by Hikaru retorting later to a schoolmate that he cannot play for the school club even if he really wants to. Furthermore, even in HikaGo, Go is an esoteric field. Most people don’t know what a Go pro player is, and Hikaru’s mother comments that the Go world is weird. There are several one-shots portraying how people who want to play Go professionally are more or less isolated from the mainstream society. Go players form their own community, but for a teenager like Hikaru, being separated from a majority of peers probably has its toll.
For the second sacrifice, one of the most poignant moment in the manga to me is when Hikaru announces to his Go club that he wants to be an insei. Hikaru has his selfish moments but he essentially does not want to hurt others. But at that point, he knowingly made a decision that would basically destroy the club and it is visibly difficult for him. The theme of personal growth at the cost of others is also brought up in the Go pro-exam. The manga goes a great length to show how much people invest in the hope to be a pro player, and by prioritizing his own advance in the Go world, Hikaru makes all their efforts go to naught. Lastly and most personally relevant to Hikaru, his wish to play Go increasingly clashes with Sai’s, and though it’s not his fault but Sai disappears after Hikaru achieves a certain level of growth because Sai’s role is ostensibly to guide Hikaru to that level. So Hikaru’s advance in Go ultimately costs him Sai, and he obviously is not prepared at all for this price.
A point I find interesting in HikaGo is that all Go players (or at least the “real” ones, the type represented by Akira and Sai) are inherently selfish in that they relentlessly seek to improve themselves, sometimes in the face of social expectations (this point clearly applies to all competitive sport). Akira coldly skips a match in the Pro exam to pursue the mysterious player, even if that comes off as a supremely arrogant act in the eyes of other candidates. The Meijin openly states that he is glad to be free from obligations of a Go player (presumably to chase after his unknown opponent), even if his out-of-the-blue decision causes chaos in all the leagues. Can this selfishness be the special something that all great Go players need?