John Fairbairn lives in London. Now retired, he worked as a political journalist and technical translator. Prior to moving to London, he also taught a technical Japanese reading course for the University of Newcastle (his home town).
His longest-held hobby is the Japanese board game go. As a specialist in oriental languages, he has translated and written many books about go and shogi (Japanese chess) and presented many papers at international seminars.
He has also developed go and shogi software. With his late friend T Mark Hall, he set up the GoGoD (Games of Go on Disc;
www.gogodonline.co.uk) database of professional go games which now has over 100,000 games.
He spent 11 years writing for The Shogi Association's magazine, providing translations and original research on the shogi variants for founder George Hodges. During this period he also worked on developing a shogi computer program, and also a xiangqi (Chinese chess) program, for a team led by David Levy.
He has been a go player since 1965. Although he holds the rank of amateur 3-dan in the British Go Association, his main go interest is the game's history. He has written many original features in Go World, including the first substantial expositions of ancient Chinese, ancient Korean and Tibetan go in English.
As regards go, his focus in retirement shifted to large books on go history so as to provide information for western players not readily available elsewhere. These books have included several on Go Seigen's 10-game matches, and a full-length biography of Honinbo Shuei. In 2019 he published "Genjo-Chitoku" - a collection of commentaries on all the games (over 80) between two of the most payers in Edo times.
