The accidental gaijin -- my first game of "shogi"

I've been a bit of a mess this week.

It's been cold, I've been sleeping almost not at all, and running late pretty much everywhere I go.

On Monday, I found myself chatting with the Japanese teacher who sits behind me in the staff room. A bit of an outsider if you can believe it, only because he's from the nearby prefecture of Nara. (the Japanese are unbelievably insular geographically) Super-nice guy. I've been out with him socially on a couple of occasions, usually with another teacher who just passed his teaching exams, the youngest here. And occasionally with one of our senior teachers, one of our two resident persimmon-barons. Also a nice guy, though I still find the social hierarchy a bit weird, both in the obsequiousness of my colleagues in his presence and how he in return throws his weight around. It's all a bit odd and discomfiting.

Anyway, I was chatting with my office mate from Nara, and asked, probably not for the first time, if he played shogi. Shogi is "Japanese chess", and along with kyūdō(Japanese archery), it represents the main cultural in-roads I've decided to pursue while in Japan. I'd never played before, nor did I know the rules, but I'd picked up a cheap cardboard board and wooden pieces at the hyaku-yen shop (aka: dollar store) and was still looking for someone to show me the ropes. My companion checked his calendar and suggested the next day, Tuesday, after school. That was a little sooner than I expected. I wanted a bit of time to at least learn the rules so I wouldn't completely humiliate myself, but I agreed and got busy trying to find out more about the game. That pretty much amounted to printing off the wikipedia entry and trying to come to grips with how different this game was from western/international chess. Pretty damn different, as it happens.

For those interested, let me describe the key differences.

In both chess and shogi, pawns are the most numerous actors. They are the grunts, the footsoldiers, and while they are readily sacrificed in play, in either game it is foolish to underestimate them. The main difference here, however, is that, while in chess, pawns attack at forward diagonals, in shogi, they attack directly ahead. This means that while they often lock up in the centre in a game of chess, blocking the progress of many more powerful pieces in the back, in shogi the centre is a free-for all. Soldiers either keep at weapons length or they engage and fall, clearing the way. The locking or clearing of the centre represents a fundamental strategic decision in any game in chess. That element is completely absent in shogi. (I always try to have new chess players try to visualize pawns wielding lengthy weapons like pikes but having limited space, requiring that they be pointed obliquely; here, I imagined the shorter weapons of Japanese soldiers, perhaps some kind of stabbing short sword.)

Another fundamental characteristic of chess is the progression through stages of play, usually from an opening, where pieces are "developed" to ideal positions, to begin the middlegame siege. Endgame is usually characterized by very careful play on a board largely cleared of pieces. Well not so in shogi. In chess, pieces are said to be "captured", but they never return to the board. It's really a polite way of saying that they've been killed in action. In shogi, pieces really are captured, and in any subsequent turn, the capturing player can return them to the board to fight for their new master. ANYWHERE on the board. As a kind of story element, it seems both dramatic and ridiculous. I like the idea of reinforcements -- a new lancer joins the fray; the cavalry charges in. But I have no idea how to imagine a foot soldier popping up from nowhere behind enemy lines; a general appearing suddenly in front of the opponent's king. It's bizarre. And to a player of western chess, hugely unpredictable. So nothing recognizable as an endgame ever takes place in shogi. Reinforcements keep arriving at critical moments in any open location, blocking threats, directing attacks, and generally messing with the western player's idea of carefully constructed areas of threat and safety.

As if this weren't enough, each type of piece can be promoted in enemy terrain to take on entirely new characteristics. Picture a knight riding into battle and then hopping off his horse. Suddenly, he moves and attacks in completely different ways. So too, the fuhyō (footsoldiers), the kyōsha (lances), the keima (knights), single hisha (flying chariot -- a rook) and kakugyō ("angle mover" -- a bishop), and ginshō (silver generals). Only the king and the kinshō (gold generals) cannot be promoted and so carry the same pattern of moves throughout the game. It's like "counters" in the Japanese language. You can't simply use numbers for things -- one plate, one book, one cup, one dog, one person -- each category of object requires not only a different word for the object itself but for the number that precedes it.

All this to say that, getting two hours of sleep Monday night, I was wholly unprepared for Tuesday. It's sometimes not bad for teaching, particularly in the afternoon, where sleep-deprived genki-ness helps keep the students entertained and interested. But not particularly good for shogi, I think. In particular, when trying to study the wiki notes that morning, I found myself running up against a surprisingly tough obstacle wholly unexpected: I was having trouble telling the pieces apart. I had learned their moves for the most part, including their differences before and after promotion, but the Japanese script used to identify the pieces looked much the same to me. Here I could spot the kanji for "wheel" -- ah yes, a flying chariot, the eastern rook. But wait, here's "wheel" again -- the "incense chariot", the lancer unknown in the western game. Other pieces likewise looked confusingly alike. That didn't bode well. You can't play a game mistaking pieces for each other -- even a couple such mistakes would be disastrous. So I asked that our game be postponed until I could at least learn which pieces were which. Amused, my colleague agreed. Shortly thereafter I discovered that it was actually Valentine's Day, and I adopted that as my excuse. (Sorry Jules! She hadn't realized either, and actually, in Japan, this is her day to give me a gift. We guys return the favour on White Day -- March 14.) Anyway, I basically put shogi out of my mind at that point, thinking that we would set another date in a week or so.

Advance to Thursday. Still short on sleep, still averaging just two hours a night, and really feeling it. In fact, I'm just about losing it. I'm feeling down after Valentine's Day for some odd reason, brooding about unresolved decisions regarding work and the future, and generally a mess. At that point, my Nara friend asks me what I'm doing Friday. I don't know, I say -- why? Well as it turns out, he and our senior colleague are spending Friday night at the school. Why, you might ask? They are guarding the examination papers. Yes, a safe is not enough. Teachers are taking shifts across the weekend, and these two are first. (for a measley 3000 yen as it turns out, but I'm not certain that they volunteered) So if I want to come in on Friday night, he says, we can play all the shogi we want. Wow. Ok, I say, unsure but thinking that it would probably be nice of me to give him something to do. But come Friday I'm still sleep deprived, and I am ready to beg off again when he tells me that he has club activity practice after school, so we wouldn't even be starting till 8 or 9pm. Besides, I hadn't glanced at the shogi materials since cancelling on Tuesday, and tired, had made a bit of a mess of my afternoon class and was ready for the weekend. But then he caught me a bit later and said that we can play at 7:00 -- he would go home right after work and change, return to oversee his club activity, and then order in. Eh... how could I refuse? So I finished up at work and headed home relatively early -- at 4:30 -- thinking that maybe I'd take a short nap and then study my ass off so the event wouldn't be a complete disaster.

Well, I get home and have a bite to eat and procrastinate, and I'm so messed up that the next thing I know, it's a quarter to seven, I'm freezing cold (9 degrees Celcius in my living room), and my computer is on the floor, having fallen from my lap. All not good. Ugh. So I get myself up, turn the heater on for the few moments it will give me, hurriedly get dressed, and bolt out the door. Well no bloody time to walk to school, so I take one of the ramshackle bikes I have in the nearby shed -- no working headlight, slightly wonky wheels, and worst: no brakes -- and headed off for the pitch-black roads between the rice fields between home and school. Less than ten minutes I'm at the school, remarkably in one piece. Students lingering after club practices greet me as I go by, and finding a door open by the office, I change shoes for indoor slippers and boogie to the staff room, just 7 or 8 minutes late.

My Nara companion is there, along with his senior guard-comrade for the evening. Also there was our youngest teacher, hanging around to socialize and (!) watch the match. A few other teachers were there but on their way out. I was glad I had munched on a piece of chicken when I got home from school. Food had already been ordered so I made do with coffee while I studied the shogi wiki printouts for the first time since Tuesday. I also got out the school shogi board and pieces -- still a cheap set but much nicer than mine -- and decided to familiarize myself with the look of the pieces directly. Well, I was in trouble. They were nothing like the clear, abbreviated script-symbols used on the setup chart in the wiki. Rather, they looked like the slightly less clear photos of the pieces themselves, and were terribly hard to identify. Worse, there were many pieces from different sets mixed together, so that I sometimes had trouble identifying like pieces as even the same kind. Uh oh.

We chatted a bit and my young colleague dropped the news on me that he and his girlfriend had split up. He had wanted to marry her, but it was a cross-prefectural romance, and she didn't want to leave her home. So I commiserated with him a bit before the four of us settled down to begin the game. As always, my senior colleague supplied what I could only guess was wry commentary in Japanese as I found myself unable to identify the pieces well enough to even set up the board. Either embarassed for me or not expecting much of a match to follow, he retired to his desk while I sorted out my pieces.

Then, with my heartbroken workmate as a lone spectator, we began. I was given first move. Um, great I guess.

So I rifled through my papers quickly for an opening. The wiki mentions two: an elaborate "castle" defence (they use many terms from chess, but in completely different ways) and a much simpler one, taking only six moves to put together. At this point I couldn't really understand any strategic benefits behind this opening, but it gave me something definite to do so I began it. Before I'd made my third move, my opponent came crashing into my line, taking the first of my pawns while my king was halfway from safety, halfway to safety, basically hanging out with his neck exposed. I'd failed to recognize a piece. It cost me and it looked like it was going to cost me a lot more.

And that pretty much set the tone. I lost three pieces before I began to even consistently identify what it was I was looking at. Then began a rather steep learning curve in tactics while I faced more pieces than I had -- then more pieces again as my captured soldiers were "dropped" behind my lines in service of my enemy.
My opponent made just one blunder, losing his angle-mover. Or rather, my angle-mover. I resolved to not let him be recaptured again. And gradually a strange thing happened.

The tide began to turn.

It turns out that, while wildly different, certain principles of shogi and chess are the same. In either game, your options when under attack are to defend the piece, counterattack, or if possible, threaten the king. Threats to the king cannot be ignored. So -- if you are very, very careful -- you can hold off a knife to your throat indefinitely so long as you keep one on your opponent. Things were looking grim in one corner of my little kingdom. Enemy pieces were promoted and it was beginning to look like it wasn't part of my domain at all. I focused on attacking the enemy king and keeping him under attack from that point on, first pinning a gold general to him (a chess move!) and then desperately trying to arrange forks to simultaneously threaten afar while taking out threats at home. But, deranged from lack of sleep and pumped up on caffeine, I physically shook with nervousness at every move, as I could never be sure whether I had misidentified an enemy piece which would then come sweeping in and take something vital, returning it to the battlefield a turn later to be used against me.

I was lucky, however, and didn't miss any threats, and move after move I mounted new pressure on my opponent. It turns out that shogi is a kind of power-mad chess player's dream. The ability to reinforce anywhere on the board permits the mounting of threats unheard of in chess. That also meant that I had to keep the pressure on. One turn of release and new pieces would be falling from the sky to attack well inside my camp. Slowly, I took back the pieces I had lost and the cluster of available reinforcement shrank on my opponents' side while growing on mine, and I added them to my attack. We played a very good game then, I think. I made no major blunders and neither did he. Where I could have caught him out he always chose a different way, and never passed up the opportunity to drop whatever captured pieces he had to block my attacks and isolate my pieces. I nearly blundered with disturbing frequency, mind you -- just realizing in time that a contemplated move would fall to a (until then misidentified) piece, or mistaking my own piece for one of different abilities. I often stopped to scan my wiki printouts, reminding myself time and again of the moves available both to my pieces and to his.

Some two hours later it was all over. I had won.

So picture this. I'm in a country where, if you ever needed to let the boss win at golf, it's here. Standing is paramount. Saving face is critical.

Not only do I, a lowly gaijin ("barbarian"), beat my opponent, I do so at shogi, the Japanese answer to western chess, all the while scanning sheets to check how the pieces move and saying things like: "Keima desu, ne?" (that's my knight, right?) "Ryūō desu ka?" (That's a dragon king, isn't it?)

So I figure I may as well have just slapped him across the face. It didn't even occur to me to intentionally lose. I figured he would take care of the winning on his own. I was just struggling to stay afloat.

"You are very strong player" he said when it was all over. "Uh. I was pretty lucky, I think," I said. I thanked him for the game and we promised to play again some time. He headed out for a cigarette and I, still shaking somewhat, gathered my things to head for home. I met the other two teachers on the way out. They, probably out of kindness, didn't ask how the game went, and I certainly didn't tell them. But they'll ask my opponent, as will others who knew we were going to play tonight. I feel bad about it. It was a stunning victory and I'm proud as all hell to have been able to pull it off, but it's an embarassing turn of events for my colleague. I mean, on the way out, I joked that my senior colleague was a kind of fuhyō, guarding those examination papers. Uh, says my young workmate, "the fuhyō is of a very low standing." D'oh. That's my typical level of rudeness around here. Unthinking. (I replied that yes, that's true, but the pawn then becomes the kinshō, a symbolically important and grand evolution. That appeared to placate him.)

Anyway, I don't know if there are any shogi matches in my immediate future, or whether I should seriously entertain losing any of them if I have a choice in the matter. That's not something I would ever consider doing at home but perhaps here it's another question. Then again, a gaijin can't hope for integration anyway; rudeness is expected. I can at least earn a little respect.

So that was my first shogi game. A surprise for everyone. Now I think I'll get some sleep.

Some pictures.

Kanji chaos. What is what?
Notice the captured pieces off-side, ready to be "dropped" back onto the board.
My lower left flank has been infiltrated. I'm in trouble, but starting the counter-attack.


My opponent, looking confident.


And it's all over. Ōtedzume. Check mate.