Fatherly Concerns (Hikaru no Go: Morishita-sensei, on Waya)

[eeveee]

Shigeo Morishita liked the concept of tradition, not fixing things that weren't actually broken and all that. His father had played Go, as had his grandfather, and even though he didn't know exact details of family history further back than that, he felt that that was enough for him to have certain expectations for the generation that was to follow. He had taken it as a sign of the times when Kazuo would decline offers of teaching games in favor of playing soccer, and Shigeko laughed and proceeded to tell her own father to his face that the only people who played Go were old codgers like him. Indignation at the lacking respect for his hard labour aside, he had never been conservative enough to entirely repress his own observations. Much as he would like to do it, he couldn't make himself believe that any duty in time would become a joy. He had resigned himself to watch his children grow up to video games and American films and Starbucks coffee, and only voiced his complaints about their self-elected ignorance over dinner. And so it had gone until his sister had dragged one of her entirely average students over one night, after having giggled over the phone about how he wouldn't shut up after she told him that her brother was a professional Go player.

Young Yoshitaka Waya was an exception among today's youth, and it had taken Shigeo twenty minutes and a breathless smile over his Go board to decide that Waya was to carry on where he own blood would not. It had taken considerably more effort to convince the boy's parents that the career of professional Go was respectable, reliable and reasonably profitable. He had only met them face-to-face on a few occasions, the only memorable one being when he invited them to dinner to give his wife the chance to have words with the boy's mother. It had taken that, and the appraising look that Waya's father had given Shigeo's car, for the hard-working little runt to be entered in the Insei program and properly fed at the Morishita family at least once weekly.

For a brief while after Shigeko entered middle school, he had entertained the idea that her habit of forcing desserts out of his students under the guise of celebration in time could be cultivated into making Waya his son in name as well as legacy. He had never gotten around to being serious about it, however; there was really no other proper thing to do than subtly encourage her not-quite-polite claims to sweets, and he realized that that one had backfired the day he walked past the ice cream bar at the corner and found her being fed sugar by some brat in soccer gear who clearly was much too close to her own age.

Disrespectful children aside, one did need a certain pride to make a profession of playing Go, both among ones peers and among the gaping masses. This was why Shigeo had made it a principle not to gossip about his colleagues and his students. But kids these days were not raised as he once had been, and Saeki didn't even have the manners to lower his voice like the women did as he shared the news with Shirakawa, right on Shigeo's doorstep. Shigeo, for his part, would have liked to dismiss it as the ridiculous rumor it sounded like at first, but it proved difficult. Saeki had it from a lunch break chat with Kouyou's Ashiwara - and why had Saeki been consorting with the enemy? - who had heard it from Touya junior. Shigeo didn't know the younger Touya personally, but he certainly knew the older well enough to know that he wouldn't raise his son to spread lies. The certain evidence of the truth of the tale was that Kouyou's boy allegedly had it from Shigeo's own house - from Shindou. Shindou was one of the more reliable sources when it came to things concerning Waya, and had evidently had the wits not to talk about it to somebody who could have told Shigeo directly. That suggested a need for discretion, and ultimately that there was more truth to the claims than Waya's mother would appreciate if she ever heard them.

He didn't want to interrogate Shindou about it - these were things that never had been meant for his ears, and Shindou had been known to lie to cover for his friends before. He would have twice the reason know, as Shigeo had gathered as much as that the other party involved also was part of that category. That did not reassure him; Shindou's fraternization with Akira Touya would make any sensible person a bit wary of his choice of company. Anyway, Waya was like the son he should have had, and remaining passive to this kind of development in his life was simply no option. He did not in any way trust the boy's father to take care of it in an appropriate manner, either. For that, Waya had made a few too many complaints about his father's reluctance to actually telling people about his son's choice of career. Shigeo had no business meddling between father and son, but he strongly suspected that the forced indifference to Waya's profession would crumble if it came out that playing Go had introduced him to lesser honourable sides of life.

It wasn't that he thought that Waya was stupid enough to let it go on long enough for that to happen, or was unprepared to face the consequences following if it did - he knew that he had raised him better than that. Still, he had never exchanged as much as three words with the young man in involved, and while he usually would have sat back in the assurance that he could trust Waya's judgement, he also knew a thing or three about being young and stupid. It was often easy to forget that the young Go professionals weren't older than their actual age, and he wouldn't want some questionable character taking advantage of Waya's... well, of Waya's potential temporary lapse of common sense, for then to leave him to face whatever problems might follow alone.

As long as the boy was too young to participate in political decisions and buying his own beer, he was also too young to have any dubious entanglements go ignored.
Which was why it took Shigeo three days to corner one Isumi 2-dan at the institute and demand to know his intentions towards Yoshitaka.