Shogi no Densetsu

As we all know, the most disgusting type of person on the planet is an American nerd who likes Japanese things. You might know the type. The sort of pale, basement-dwelling loser who is so socially, emotionally and aesthetically retarded that he (or she?) dreams about anime schoolgirls, and who furiously studies Japanese in the hopes of one day going there and sleeping with Asian chicks who don’t know what a slovenly dweeb he is. The type of person who collects Final Fantasy action figures, dresses up in Dragonball Z costumes, and will get into epic battles on message boards about the sexual habits of Pikachu.

I do not want to be this type of person.

However, I hereby confess that I am very interested in Japan and always have been. My only excuse is that the whole thing started at least 20 years ago, way before I knew what I was getting into. It began with the following formative experiences: 1) ca. 1983, the G.I. Joe comic books introduced me to ninjas (namely, Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes) and I learned how to make an origami throwing star, 2) ca. 1986, the Nintendo Entertainment System let me play Super Mario Brothers, Zelda and Castlevania while the Sony Walkman I got for my birthday let me blast the Back to the Future soundtrack, and 3) ca. 1987, I read James Clavell’s Shogun. It’s been all downhill since. Domo ari-frigging-gato.

Why am I publicly baring my shameful Nipponophilia this particular week? One word: Shogi.

My regular reader (hi Kim!) will recall that I have been learning that the game of chess is not just a boring European game with several fruity pieces (bishops? a queen? sentient stone towers?) but a gritty war simulator and worldwide sensation that swept the globe starting from around 700 AD. The prototypical battle game still exists in various mutated forms throughout all of Europe and Asia.

The original lineup, of the reconstructed Indian game Chaturanga, was supposed to represent an army: Foot soldiers (pawns), chariots (rooks), cavalry (knights), elephants (bishops), advisor/ bodyguard (queen), and general (king). The genius of the game was, and is, that each type of military unit moves in a different, characteristic way. All of the existing variations of chess maintain these six ancient army units, albeit with mutated names and some additions. Chinese chess enlarged the board, took the weird step of placing the pieces not inside the squares but on the board’s gridlines, added a fearsome catapult/cannon aptly called the pao, and introduced geographic features on the actual board - a river and two fortresses. European chess kept the ancient Indian board and piece count but sped up the game by greatly augmenting the powers of some of the pieces - which formerly could only move a square or two at a time - and gave them new identities in keeping with medieval European society, where queens, bishops, and castle towers were far more prevalent than viziers, elephants or chariots.

I’ve more or less discussed all this before, after I saw dozens of men on streetcorners playing Chinese chess in Vietnam, and people playing the primitive Thai chess, makruk, in Bangkok. But now I’m trying to learn what is clearly the most idiosyncratic and fiendishly complicated chess mutation of them all: Japanese chess, or Shogi.

Shogi is chess gone completely Japanese, by which I mean it is refined, complex, subtle, and damn near inscrutable to outsiders. Why haven’t you heard of it before? For one thing, you almost have to be Japanese just to distinguish the pieces. It’s played on an unpainted wooden board with unpainted wooden pieces marked on both sides with obscure characters. Why characters on both sides of the piece? All forms of chess have some type of unit promotion once certain pieces reach the far side of the board, in order to let those pieces continue moving. In European chess, the familiar promotion is when a pawn makes it across the board and becomes a queen. But Shogi takes this to the extreme, and when most of the pieces reach any of the far three rows, they power up, leap into the air and flip over, revealing their supercharged identities. A pawn turns into a gold general, a rook turns into a dragon, and so on - all with new moves. A further complication is that where Chinese chess uses a single character to identify each piece, Shogi uses at least two, and the names are odd: for example, the corner pieces are called “fragrant chariots” and the enemy king is the “jade general”.

Confused yet? I haven’t even gotten to Shogi’s most unique feature. Captured enemy pieces, apparently brainwashed or bribed to fight for your side, can be re-deployed, ninja style, almost anywhere on the board, at any time. This ronin feature is not found in any other version of chess, and turns the game’s tactics upside down. This is another reason why the pieces are all the same color - they might belong to the other side a few turns down the road.

In spite of all these obstacles and oddities, I learned how the pieces move and their various characters pretty quickly, and I just beat a Shogi Gameboy game, Minna no Shogi, on my second try, despite the fact that the pieces are too small to distinguish on the Gameboy screen. There’s probably a difficulty setting somewhere (I hope) that’s currently set on “wicked easy”, because as confidence-boosting as my Shogi victory was, if I bought a European chess game and beat it immediately, I’d want my money back. I have a second Gameboy Shogi game, Morita Shogi, and I’m hoping that’s tougher. The whole thing has also reminded me how chess-like my recent favorite games Advance Wars and Fire Emblem are.

Moving from the virtual world to the actual one, I already bought a Shogi set months ago in a toy store at the mall here in KL, a cheap Chinese production that consists of pieces that look like reject wood chips with writing on them, and a roll-up board that’s like a ’70s dinner placemat, but hopefully I will one day go to Japan and get the chance to buy a slightly fancier set. I have always been very impressed with the wood-revering Japanese aesthetic, and I like the unpainted, calligraphic look of the Shogi pieces. The tragedy is, of course, that I am not outgoing enough to play board games and will probably never play against anyone. Maybe someday I’ll have children I can force to play chess with me.

What’s my point here? Just that I was fascinated to find out that there’s Japanese chess, a strange evolutionary cousin to European chess. And I think the subject of what each variety of chess might say about the society that developed it is intriguing. For example, I recently read somewhere that asymmetry is a key feature of a lot of Japanese art and design - and Shogi is the only type of chess with asymmetrical layout of the bishop and rook. Could there be a connection between Japanese military or religious philosophy and the unique Shogi rules of re-deploying captured pieces? You tell me. And my Western brethren - if you like chess and know any Chinese, Korean, or Japanese people, ask them about their version.

Note: The title of this post, “Shogi no Densetsu” is what I believe to be “The Legend of Shogi” in Japanese. If you know better, by all means disabuse me of this notion per comment posthaste.