Yoshiharu Habu | TEDxTokyo 2012
When he was just 25, Yoshiharu Habu became the only player ever to simultaneously seize all seven titles of the ancient board game known as shogi. He’d been a pro since junior high and is an international chess player of note, but that singular feat indicates why the crop of dangerous rivals that arose alongside him is called “the Habu generation”. Yoshiharu says that IT and the Internet forever altered the shogi world, allowing the borderless sharing of strategies and producing a massive traffic jam of players with similar abilities.
Yoshiharu’s Highway Theory hypothesizes that being creative and innovative is what will allow players to bypass the traffic jam and turn quantity into quality̶and victories. (His favorite word, reirou, essentially means a new and transparent mindset.) If his over seventy titles provide any indication̶trailing only the eighty the late Yasuharu Ooyama won – the theory holds. That deep thinking is no doubt why his books Ketsudanryoku (The Power of Decisions) and Habu’s Brain have sold hundreds of thousands of copies.