Under the Stones: How Bushido Made Me Want to Learn Go

Last month I caught Kazuya Shiraishi’s Bushido, original title Gobangiri, at my local arthouse theater, which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes me sound like I own three black turtlenecks and have opinions about aspect ratios. But listen, as the big kahuna behind VIKINGS vs SAMURAI, I have a sacred duty to see any movie involving samurai, Vikings, or, ideally, some deranged combination of the two.

And here’s the thing: I’ve always wanted to work the game of Go into one of my stories. It has that perfect dramatic quality. Two people sitting across from each other, barely moving, while a war happens in miniature between them. That’s cinema, baby. The problem was, when I saw Bushido, I knew roughly enough about Go to understand that black stones and white stones were being placed on a board by people who clearly knew something I did not.

The strategies? Over my head.

The feints? Over my head.

The attacks? Buddy, they were flying at cruising altitude.

But the movie got its hooks in me. So I did what any reasonable person does after seeing a samurai film about honor, revenge, and board-game warfare. I bought a Go board.

I am, and I cannot stress this enough, terrible at Go. Just catastrophically bad. But I’m putting in the reps. I’m reading books, playing on my phone, watching YouTube videos, and slowly trying to evolve from “man who places stones randomly” to “man who loses with a vague sense of why.”

That’s how I found GoMagic, a modern Go, Baduk, and Weiqi education channel and learning platform that promises you can “learn Go Game the magical way.” They do lessons, interviews, commentaries, shorts, history, culture, the whole thing. What I like about them is that they don’t make Go feel like some ancient alien math problem carved into a temple wall. They make it feel like a game. A visual game. A playable game. A game that maybe, someday, I might only be moderately awful at.

So naturally I wondered if they’d ever cover Bushido. And today, they did.

In the video, GoMagic host Vadim asks a great question: how many movies are genuinely about Go? Not movies where Go is sitting in the corner like expensive wallpaper, but movies where the game actually matters. And his breakdown of Bushido makes the film even better. Every board position is real. Every move is chosen to echo the story. There’s a hidden “under the stones” move that quietly foreshadows the plot. There’s a villain playing san-ren-sei (three star points in a row) as White two centuries before that style was invented, which is such a beautifully specific kind of historical arrogance that I almost have to respect it.

That’s the stuff I love. That’s the good stuff. That’s when a movie doesn’t just use Go as atmosphere, but treats it like character, theme, weapon, confession, and trap.

So now I have a deeper appreciation for Bushido, and for Go itself. And I’m absolutely keeping that “under the stones” move in my back pocket for future games.

Will I know when to use it?

Almost certainly not.

But when I do, I’m going to feel like a goddamn samurai.