{"id":35576,"date":"2021-08-20T23:43:43","date_gmt":"2021-08-20T14:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/aug\/20\/maki-kaji-obituary"},"modified":"2021-08-20T23:43:43","modified_gmt":"2021-08-20T14:43:43","slug":"maki-kaji-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=35576","title":{"rendered":"Maki Kaji obituary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018Godfather of sudoku\u2019 who paved the way for the worldwide boom in number puzzles<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/aug\/17\/maki-kaji-godfather-of-sudoku-dies-aged-69-in-japan\" title=\"\">Maki Kaji<\/a>, who has died aged 69 of bile duct cancer, was a Japanese publisher who achieved international recognition as the \u201cgodfather of sudoku\u201d. His puzzle magazine <a href=\"https:\/\/nikoli.co.jp\/en\/puzzles\/\" title=\"\">Nikoli<\/a> paved the way for the 21st-century boom in pencil-and-paper number puzzles, examples of which appear daily in almost every newspaper around the world (including this one). He considered himself an entertainer, bringing joy and pleasure through numbers and logical thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Maki launched Nikoli in 1980. A couple of years later he was flicking through an American puzzle magazine when his eyes landed on a puzzle called Number Place, which involved filling in a 9&#215;9 grid with the digits from 1 to 9, such that each digit appears only once in each row and column. He spoke no English and it was the only puzzle he understood in the magazine.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/aug\/20\/maki-kaji-obituary\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018Godfather of sudoku\u2019 who paved the way for the worldwide boom in number puzzlesMaki Kaji, who has died aged 69 of bile duct cancer, was a Japanese publisher who achieved international recognition as the \u201cgodfather of sudoku\u201d. His puzzle magazine Nikol&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[88,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35577,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35576\/revisions\/35577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}