* This was originally posted on my old blog on August 12, 2010.
* 筆者の以前のブログに2010年8月12日付で投稿された記事の再掲です。
Shogi is a Japanese board game resembling chess in many ways. It is played by two players, and the purpose of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king. The origin of both chess and shogi is thought to be the ancient Indian game Chaturanga, which is also the common ancestor of other similar games such as Makruk in Thailand, Xiangqi in China and Janggi in Korea. Nevertheless, there are some major differences between chess and shogi. For example, in shogi, if you capture a piece of the opponent, you can later return it to the board as your own material. In chess, however, captured pieces are removed from the board for good.
I recently read an interesting story to do with this difference between chess and shogi. Just after the World War II, the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP), which occupied and governed Japan, tried to prohibit shogi by reasoning that the reuse of captured pieces was connected to the ill-treatment of prisoners of war. To overcome this crisis, Japan Shogi Association sent Kozo Masuda, who was one of the best shogi players at the time, to GHQ/SCAP as their representative. There, Masuda said to an officer of GHQ/SCAP, "What we do in shogi is effective utilization of human resources. In chess, the game of your culture, you kill all the captured pieces. This is absolutely an ill-treatment of prisoners, isn't it? Besides, even the Queen goes to war in chess, and you have to sacrifice her when King is in danger. We have no women in the battlefield of shogi. You say your culture has the manner of ladies first, but I really doubt it." After this meeting, GHQ/SCAP decided not to prohibit shogi.
To the modern eye, it looks quite silly to compare those two relative games to each other in such an ideological way and argue over which is superior. But even today, chess fans and shogi fans sometimes do not get along well. Some chess fans say that shogi is a mere local variation of chess and attracts a limited number of eccentrics, while chess is truly a global game whose value is recognized by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Shogi fans, on the other hand, claim that chess is less complicated and it's a kind of primitive form of the more sophisticated game, shogi.
As a chess fan in the country of shogi, I hope harmonious co-existence and co-prosperity of both games. Actually, there are some good signs. One of the shogi variants has got rid of kanji marks from the pieces so that children and people from foreign countries easily understand the game. Bughouse and Crazyhouse are variants of chess in which the reuse of captured pieces is allowed just as shogi. Although not all of those attempts are successful (and not all of them are fun to play), it is great to know that there are people who are trying to keep these great games alive. I believe their pursuit for new possibilities also helps revitalize the traditional styles of the games.
