less than six Japanese forms of the game were current:
Little Shogi, in which one Elephant was restored, and two Leopards, a Flying Chariot (Rook), and a Diagonal Runner (Bishop) were added, making 46 pieces in all;
Middle Shogi, with a board of 12 squares each way and 92 pieces;
Great Shogi, with a board of 15 squares each way and 130 pieces;
Great-Great Shogi, 17 squares each way and 192 pieces;
Maka-Great-Great Shogi, 19 squares each way and 192 pieces. (Maka is the Japanese rendering of Sanskrit Maha, meaning great, so the game is called Great 3 Shogi);
Tai-Shogi, a final supreme chess-to-end-all-chess, invented by some recreational megalomaniac, with a board 25 squares each way and a total of 354 pieces.
The opening set-up of a game of Maka-Great-Great Shogi is like a menagerie. The first rank is presumably human, with its Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron, Stone, and Clay generals, but the next four ranks are a jungle of Furious Dragons, Raging Tigers, Blind Boars, Soaring Phoenixes, Hard-Biting Wolves, Thrashing Serpents, and even the odd Cat and Old Rat. In front of this horde is a single line of 19 stolid Pawns. In the rear is the Commander who might well say, like the Duke of Wellington at a march-past, “I don’t know what effect they’ll have on the enemy, but by Heaven they frighten me!”
One would think that the play must have been hopelessly con fused; however, we know that this mastodon of a game was actually played. On September 12, 1142 a minister at court recorded in his diary that he played Maka-Great-Great Shogi in the Imperial presence, adding the pathetic note, “I lost.”
Towards the end of the sixteenth century a great purge was made, and the game was standardized to a board 9 squares each way and a total of 40 pieces. The reform is traditionally attributed to the Emperor Go-Nara who based it on Little Shogi minus the Elephants and Leopards. This talented Emperor is also supposed to have introduced the revolutionary rule by which a captured piece becomes the property of the capturing side and can be dropped on the board. The rule is the special characteristic of Japanese chess, found in no other game of the family. It gives Shogi a peculiar excitement, which was doubtless necessary to replace the lost thrills of leopards and tigers.
Shogi was taken up by three great generals of sixteenth-seventeenth-century Japan: Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu. They esteemed it for its original purpose, namely as an exercise in military strategy and tactics. Ieyasu became sole ruler of Japan, and under his patronage the game was popular with high and low.
In the seventeenth century the first championships were held. The second champion, Ohashi, established the rules, including a new rule against the repetition of moves. The championship descended, in the Japanese fashion, in the Ohashi and Ito families. (This does not work out so badly as might be expected because of the Japanese custom of adopting into the family the favorite pupil, to whom certain trade secrets are then imparted.) Early in the twentieth century the granting of the title was formally surrendered to the All-Japan Shogi Association, to be competed for regularly.
At present Shogi players are organized in two classes, professionals and amateurs. There is a ranking system under which a beginner enters in the 15th kyu class and works his way down until he becomes 1st kyu. This is a reasonable amateur level. The next step is to 1st dan grade, and then he goes up through the dans. In the 8th dan there are generally some 30-40 masters, with probably fewer in the 7th and 6th dan ranks below. Three living masters have attained 9th dan rank (which is fought out among the 8th dans), and they are all also championship holders.
Amateurs do well if they get a 1st dan grade certificate from the All-Japan Shogi Association; the top rank ever held by an amateur is 5th dan.
Shogi is extremely popular among all classes. There is almost no magazine without a column on it, and the evening editions of the big daily papers feature some current tournament game, giving a few moves and a long commentary. A top Shogi master thus can make a reasonably good living by writing articles and books for the very wide Shogi public and by giving lessons. Some of the masters are striking personalities in their own right and well-known figures on the Japanese scene. For instance former champion Yoshio Kimura, when he retired from tournament play, overnight became a television star noted for his sharp wit.
THE BOARD AND THE MEN
I. The Board
THE BOARD is 9 squares each way, giving 81 squares in all. In fact it’s not quite square but oblong, and you play down the length of it. There are no colors, either on the board or the pieces. The pieces are only distinguished by the way they point. Black is on the side nearest to us, and White opposite. The first move is Black’s.
The squares are identified, as you see, by two co-ordinates, Roman numbers one way and Arabic numbers the other. The Arabic numbers are read first, so that if we say “King-3 v,” it would mean that the King (wherever he is) moves to the third column’s fifth square, or the spot marked X on the diagram.(The Japanese books use the same numbers across the top but use the Japanese numbers down. In the Appendix we shall explain how you can easily learn these so that you can read a real Japanese score.)
The two dotted lines are the “promotion lines” which are imagined to run across the board, and to help us keep them in mind, they are marked with a couple of thick black dots on the actual board. When your pieces get to the other side of the far promotion line, or when his pieces get to your side of the near promotion line, those pieces are “promoted,” that is, they change their powers if desired. Details will be explained later.
Notice in our diagrams that we have incorporated the main Japanese character, or kanji, which will help you recognize the piece easily when you move on to the Japanese Shogi books.
II. The King
The Shogi King is like our chess King, short-sighted and cautious. He can travel just one square with each move. He starts in the middle; Black’s King (the one nearest to us) is on his original square. His possible moves are as shown. White’s King (the one further away) started on 5 i, but he has made two moves, first to 6 ii and then to 7 iii. From there he can go to any square which touches his, as shown in the diagram.
The King is the quarry; the game is to capture (checkmate) him, as in chess. In the Japanese game he nearly always stays in one of the corners and has to have quite a royal guard round him to deal with “para-troops,” which are a special feature of Shogi.
You notice that there’s no difference of color between the Kings (though they are called “Black” and “White”). In Shogi all the pieces are distinguished by the way they are facing. White’s King, looking upside down just as he does on the board, is the enemy be cause he is pointing towards us. So with all the other pieces.
Like all Shogi pieces, the King when he moves can:
(1) go to any vacant square, or
(2) move onto a square where there is an enemy piece.
In the latter case, the enemy piece is removed from the board and becomes the property of the capturing side.
III. The King’s Bodyguard: Gold and Silver
The
