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.
I feel bad about not writing much on here lately. I think I’m just preoccupied that we’re moving in a few weeks. Oh well.
Not only is this pretty much the coolest idea ever, but it’s being built in the coolest place ever in the coolest way possible. God bless Norway. The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg is also entombed in the side of a mountain (above); I guess when you have a lot of mountains this probably seems like the best way to entomb things. It’s also totally awesome. They just need to be careful not to wake the you-know-what:
The only way this could be improved upon from my perspective would be if it were a giant library instead of seeds, but seeds are OK, I guess. I believe the Germans have large underground document archives, and I’m sure other countries do, too, but something about it being on a frozen island really sets this one above the rest. And apparently it only cost 5 or 6 million bucks, which seems like peanuts for something as rad as this. 
Obviously (and I don’t want to belittle the scientific importance of the project, but this must be said) this would also be a great setting for a horror movie, first-person shooter video game, or a retarded Michael Crichton novel about how botanists are our enemies and must be destroyed.
I’ve been “tagged” with a “meme” by Kimbo. While this sort of thing can be fun, I am still a little grumpy about the term meme. I liked it better back in my college days when the word meant “speech virus”, not “unpleasant public blogsturbation”, but oh well. That crotchety reluctance of mine to let go of the past will surely make this trip down memory lane a particularly pungent and festering one.
What was I actually listening to in 1993? I was not very musically sophisticated in high school. I liked rock, and that’s it. Our family had just barely moved from records and tapes to CDs, and I mainly listened to tapes I made of “classic rock” radio and the emerging stirrings of grunge. Zeppelin. Cream. Hendrix. Pearl Jam. Stone Temple Pilots. I bought the first Rage Against the Machine album around this time, but not because I particularly liked hip hop (I didn’t, yet) but because aside from the vocals it sounded like the kind of rock music I liked. I tried to appreciate some classical music, but I only liked the kind with loud noises at the end, like Beethoven’s odd-numbered symphonies or the 1812 Overture. Classical music that sounded as much like classic rock as possible, in other words.
I’m the most proud of the last two, which I bought on whims after seeing like 20 seconds of their respective videos somewhere. Wu Tang opened up a world of new music to me, and Harvey’s has turned out to be the only CD out of all those which I still play regularly and her subsequent albums have been the soundtrack to a lot of my life. As you’ll notice, otherwise these albums were not much of a departure from my previous rock and rock-like-classical tastes, but the extra scholarship cash enabled me to branch out a bit into slightly uncharted waters. One thing I realize now, thinking back on that year, is how isolated I was. This was (I think) before you could “search for related music” on Amazon, and you basically still had to listen to the radio, or your friends, or read magazine reviews, to figure out what music to like. In lieu of friends, I had only the radio, and I only had two or three rock stations I listened to. 
That didn’t last and now, I’m physically and socially more or less just as isolated as I was back in high school, but here’s the thing: I don’t feel that way, because of the Web. I feel as if I’m almost as connected to new and exciting music, if not more connected, than I was in college, but it’s all happening online. Interesting. This is why record companies shouldn’t fear online piracy – nobody buys varied albums as foolishly and frequently as college students, and online we’re all basically living together in one big virtual dorm. If they’d lowered the price of albums to $1-$5 each, they’d probably have made way more money from CDs over the last few years than ever because everyone is all hopped up on recommendations from the web. Oh well.
Until a couple of years ago, all I knew about the New Yorker was that it tended to feature strange short stories where someone boring, usually from New York, would go through their normal day and then stop and suddenly realize they’d wasted their lives, or something. I only knew this because one of my English teachers photocopied a couple of the stories and had us read them in high school, as examples of modern “slice-of-life” writing. I think John Cheever may have been involved somehow. 
Oh hell no. No they didn’t. Didn’t they learn their lesson after being mocked by Seinfeld?
On this archive site, underneath the cartoons, there are little captions that describe the action. Only through that site was I able to decipher the cartoonist’s original intentions. I’m not going to spoil the surprise for you here, however, because I want others to feel my pain and wounded confusion upon encountering these incomprehensible monstrosities of cartooning gone wrong. Some of you will probably see the “real” “jokes”, but for those who are like me, just be aware that there are semi-humorous ideas behind these two panels, but they were both totally botched by misleading artwork - at least at the resolution of these online versions.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
In Dune, there are personal force fields that will stop bullets but not something inserted slowly. “The slow blade penetrates the shield” is the fortune-cookie mantra young Paul receives from his gruff trainer. I recently experienced something similar (without the erotic overtones) in Vietnam, where the method of crossing the street requires a sort of suicidal Zen calm. With hundreds of motorbikes whizzing by, the only successful technique is to banish all fear and slowly and steadily walk across the street as if the traffic weren’t there at all. The bikers, with plenty of time to notice your slow-moving shape, swerve like a school of fish around you. If you tried to cross the same street quickly, letting your instincts take over, you’d be dead within seconds.
I flatter myself that I have a similar approach to things like posting on here. I don’t do it quickly or often, but I do it eventually. The last week or two, however, I seem to have been standing on the curb. I think it’s partly because I’m starting to get preoccupied by our upcoming move to Bangkok. We don’t have a lot of preparations to make and it should be an easy move, but it’s still messing with my head. I’ve started to worry about things like whether or not my books are going to get (even more) moldy while they sit in the shipping warehouse, which is an idiotic thing to worry about but disturbing nonetheless.
When I read a depressing a New York Times article this morning, I had some reactions I’d like to discuss below. It was a grimly matter-of-fact article on child soldiers in Africa. Apparently several of the horrible wars ravaging the entire African continent are now being fought mainly by small children, brainwashed and pressed into service by amoral warlords bent on plunder. As if that weren’t bad enough, the article describes the children as really good soldiers, because they can be made to do almost anything and kill almost anyone, especially - and this is the part I’d like to discuss - if you wow them with tales of sorcery:
In many armed movements, children are taught that life and death depend on spirits, which are conjured up by their commanders and distilled in oils and amulets. Magic can spur children to do unspeakable things. It also bestows otherwise lackluster leaders with a veneer of supernatural respectability. “The commanders would wear certain pearls and said that guns wouldn’t hurt us,” Mr. Beah recalled. “And we believed it.” 
Reaction 1) “That is so friggin cool.” 
This is the depressing truth about human religions. They ALL started in more or less this way. This is the burning bush. This is the voice from on high. This is how it worked, and how it still works: One man, slightly more clever than the other idiots around him, wanted to make his followers obey him more mindlessly. Wanted to make his soldiers kill more ferociously. Wanted to make his decisions unquestionable. Wanted everyone to WANT to give him their time and resources, no questions asked. So what does he do? He simply says something along the lines of “I CAME FROM THE SKY. I HAVE MAGICAL AMULETS AND OILS. DO WHAT I SAY."
I hate the fact that our ancestors were so stupid, and I hate the fact that almost all of us now are still exactly as stupid. Folks, let me lay it out for you right here: A petty African thug who says he rolled to earth in a ball of stars is lying. We can all agree on that, right? And guess what? Followers who claim that a Jewish wizard was beamed into a virgin’s uterus from the sky 2,000 years ago are lying. Why is it so hard to agree on that? 
Since around 7th grade, I have been hearing about “Wicca”. The new age movement of modern day here and now witches. Except that they don’t want to be called witches, they want to be called Wiccans (with a hard ‘k’ sound). At the time, I thought, OK, that name is dignified. They must be serious. Wiccans. Like African-Americans. It is quite a dignified upgrade.
