Tsunashima House

Hakodate Central Library, 7/19, 2:30 pm

I haven’t posted in a little while, so some rapid updating is in order: I moved host-families last weekend, during the semester break; it wasn’t a matter of dissatisfaction on anybody’s part; I was just one of three students in the program whose families, for prior scheduling reasons, couldn’t keep us for the full two months. Anywho, I am adjusting very well to my new home. It’s in a neighborhood farther from the rest of town and school, but it only means that I have an extra twenty five minutes added to my morning commute, which still adds up to less than my commute in Tokyo.
My new hosts are named Yuri (woman) and Yoshihito (man). They are a couple with no children; Yoshi a university administrator and former cram school teacher; Yuri a house-wife, piano teacher, and until recently a sales representative for Amway Japan (the large American cosmetics and personal health holding company). While I don’t have any idea of their relative income to that of the Tagawa’s, but the difference that not having four children is very clear, both in the size, quality, and location of their home, as well as their mode of living: the compulsive energy saving on Okaasan’s part, the constant switching off of lights, the regimented laundry schedule, is not present here; that, and they have two cars instead of one family-size SUV, and one of them a Mercedes.
These are the sorts of comparisons for another time, but what I want to talk about in this post is something quite different. Yoshi is teaching me Shougi, Japanese Chess. The premise of the game is the same: two sides, one board, trap the king. However, the similarities only highlight the differences. For starters, the pieces are small wooden chips shaped into arrow heads with Chinese characters to indicate their value; at first glance they look like Mah-Jong tiles. The board is nine by nine, and the first three rows are your territory. There are pawns, bishop, rook, knight, and king equivalents, with slight differences in rules. There are also “silver” and “gold” pieces which move forward, but have differing restrictions on lateral and backward movement, and a rook-like piece best referred to as a scud missile, moving forward as far as there is space, but which cannot move back.
The most clever thing, though, is this oddly Buddhist notion in the game that any piece you take is also a piece you can use at will. You can reincarnate a taken piece anywhere on the board, which is a radical dynamic change from western chess. It means that one can have separate defensive and offensive strategies simultaneously; imagine defending your territory from onslaught while also dropping paratroopers behind the enemy king. This combined with the rule that most pieces, save the king and “golds” acquire extra movement powers once inside the three rows of enemy space, and Shougi looks much more realistic from a military strategy standpoint than chess does.
Yoshi has been teaching me by playing me with a handicap. Because of the reincarnate aspect of the game, the notion of handicap can be taken to its logical extreme; the first game we played had me playing with a full set and Yoshi with only the king of the board and three pawns in his “graveyard.” From this position of weakness, Yoshi was able to collect successively more powerful pieces from me and then use them for himself when reincarnated. I, on the other hand, could really only get pawns. We’ve played five games so far, and now I’m at the third “step” in handicap, where now yoshi plays with a full set of pawns, a king, and two “golds.”
I’ve clearly become entranced by Shougi, and in doing so I can’t help but think back to when my grandpa Mark tried teaching me chess. He was an Associate Master in the Soviet Union, and his was a mind that valued the logical order and discipline of the game. As a child, certainly, mine was not, and I never took it seriously. Still, some of the lessons grandpa taught me have stuck, and I’ve used them playing Shougi in a way that seems to impress Yoshi. Still, I’m not nearly as skilled as I could have been if I had actually listened to my grandfather, and though it is perhaps inappropriate for an eighteen year-old to regret anything in his life quite yet, I do wish I had been more willing to learn as a small child; not because of chess itself, but because now, when I think of grandpa, I can’t help but associate him with it. Had I the chance, I would bring him one of these Shougi sets as a present. I think he would have enjoyed the game.