‘GODFATHER OF SUDOKU’ WAS A UNIVERSITY DROPOUT.
BIG RACETRACK FAN
Maki Kaji, who has died aged 69, was known as the “Godfather of Sudoku” — the number puzzle played by millions around the world.
Kaji, a university dropout, did not invent the puzzle. The earliest version, called Numbers Place, was designed by an American in 1979. Kaji came across it in 1984 in an American magazine and thought it would fit in perfectly in a quarterly puzzle magazine he had established. He revamped the puzzle and called his version sudoku, a contraction of “suji-wa-dokushin-ni-kagiru,” Japanese for “the number must appear only once.”
Nor was Kaji responsible for turning sudoku into a worldwide craze. A New Zealander, Wayne Gould, developed a computer program that generated sudokus and in 2004 sold the idea to The Times of London. Within no time it had become a global phenomenon, filling airport gift shops, and even rivalling crosswords in popularity. More than 100 million people are thought to be sudoku fans.
Affable, chain-smoking, and dishevelled, Kaji never patented the name sudoku. As a result his magazine publishing business Nikoli receives no royalties from sales overseas by other publishers.
Kaji, a keen gambler, was not a great aficionado of the puzzle, preferring to spend his time at the racetrack. If the puzzle had made him rich, he reflected, he would have just have spent the money in Las Vegas.
Maki Kaji was born on Oct. 8, 1951. in Sapporo, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. His father was a telecoms engineer; his mother worked in a kimono shop. As a teenager, he was good enough at tennis to reach the last eight in a national high school championship. But at Keio University, where he studied Japanese literature, he preferred to spend his time betting on the horses, or playing mah-jong and pachinko — a sort of pinball game
After dropping out in his first year, he worked as a waiter, a roadie and a construction worker. In 1980, he had the idea of publishing a puzzle magazine, which did not exist in Japan. Together with three friends he launched a quarterly puzzle magazine he named Nikoli after the Irish winner of the 1980 2,000 Guineas at the Curragh.
The first print run of 500 was distributed mostly to family and friends. Kaji and his partners were novices at puzzle-making, however and, as sales slowly grew, readers wrote in to complain that some of the puzzles were unsolvable.