Who was Goro Hasegawa?

A Japanese games writer and organiser, born in Mito, Ibaraki in 1932 and died in 2016. He created modern Othello, founded the Japan Othello Association in 1973 and spent the rest of his life promoting the game.

When did Goro Hasegawa die?

On 20 June 2016, aged 83. His death was reported internationally, including by The Japan Times, which described him as the inventor of Othello.

How old was Hasegawa when he devised Othello?

Around 17. He was a school student in Mito when he began playing a flipping game with Go stones, about 1949. The commercial release came 24 years later, in April 1973.

Did Hasegawa invent Othello or Reversi?

Othello. Reversi is a Victorian English game from 1883 that uses the same flipping rule. Hasegawa fixed the opening position, the disc count and the first player, which is what made competitive play possible. The argument in full .

What is the Japan Othello Association?

The national body Hasegawa founded in March 1973, a month before the game went on sale. It ran the first Japanese championship on 4 April 1973 and still organises play in the country that dominates the sport.

Goro Hasegawa: The Creator of Othello (1932-2016)

Plenty of people invent a game. Very few build the institutions that keep one alive for fifty years. Hasegawa did both, and the second part is the reason you have heard of Othello and not of Reversi.

The facts, briefly

Born	19 October 1932, Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan
Died	20 June 2016, aged 83
Known for	Creating Othello, the modern standard form of Reversi
Founded	Japan Othello Association, March 1973
First product	Othello, Tsukuda Original, April 1973

Mito, around 1949

Hasegawa was a school student in Mito, a city about eighty miles north of Tokyo, when he started playing a flipping game with friends. Japan in the late 1940s was not a place with spare money for board games, so the equipment was whatever was to hand: Go stones, and reportedly bottle caps. Go stones come in solid black and solid white, so a captured stone has to be swapped rather than turned over, which is slow and error prone. The reversible black and white disc, one of the neatest pieces of design in board games, came later.

He did not rush. More than twenty years passed between those school games and the registration of Othello in Japan in 1971. During that time he worked as a company employee and kept refining the game and its rules.

What he changed

The flipping rule was already Victorian. What Hasegawa did was turn a loose parlour game into a fixed one.

The position Hasegawa fixed. White on d4 and e5, black on d5 and e4, black to move, with the four legal first moves marked.

One starting position, always. Old Reversi let each player drop their first two discs anywhere in the central four squares. Hasegawa fixed the four discs before play, which is what allows openings to be named and studied. See board setup and the openings index.
Black always moves first. No coin toss, no argument.
Exactly 32 discs each. The game ends if a player runs out, which tightens the endgame.
A double sided disc and a green board. The object explains the rule. Nobody who picks up an Othello disc has to be told what flipping means.

Building the sport before selling the game

The order of events in 1973 tells you what kind of person he was. The Japan Othello Association was founded in March. The first national championship was played on 4 April. The retail product from Tsukuda Original followed later that month.

Most game inventors sell first and hope a community appears. Hasegawa built the community first and then handed it something to buy. Japan has been the dominant Othello nation ever since, taking the World Othello Championship more often than any other country, including the 2025 title in Ankara, which went to Seiya Kurita for the second year running.

He also wrote extensively about the game, in books and in the association's publications, and remained its public face for four decades. When he died in June 2016, the obituaries in Japan and abroad described him simply as the inventor of Othello.

The part that is contested

This site tries not to smooth over awkward evidence, and there is some here.

In the early years Hasegawa described Othello as an improvement on Reversi. Later in his life he presented it as an original invention, and the story of how it came about changed in the telling. English Wikipedia records that shift. Reversi's flipping rule, meanwhile, is documented in England from the 1880s and is identical.

The name

Othello takes its name from Shakespeare's play, where a black Moorish general is set against a white Venetian world and turned around by an outsider. A game of constant black and white reversals fits the image. You will find accounts crediting the suggestion to Hasegawa's father, but that detail does not appear in the sources this page could check, so it is left out.

Sources

Goro Hasegawa on English Wikipedia, for dates, place of birth and the change in his account.
The Japan Times, 23 June 2016, reporting his death at 83.
Reversi on Wikipedia, for the 1971 registration, the association's founding and the Tsukuda Original launch.
World Othello Federation, for championship history.

Read next: who invented Othello, the full history of the game, or the official rules as they stand today. The computer opponent plays the standard Hasegawa position, like everyone else.