Each year, early in April, in the small castle town of Tendo to the north of Yamagata city in northern Japan, the Hana-matsuri Flower Festival begins with a parade of drum players, young men carrying mikoshi (portable shrines), and a long line of children carrying shogi koma (shogi pieces). The children, all roughly four to six, are dressed in kimonos; each holds a pole some one and a half meters high whose bottom ends in a stand and whose top is a large papier-mâché koma (chess piece). The koma is large enough to completely shade the child underneath and heavy enough to make the smaller children's burden somewhat precarious, especially if there is much of a wind.
The parade does not have far to go. In a decorated glen a few hundred meters from the parade's starting point, the children reach a game board upon which they place their pieces. Each position is outfitted with a small chair for the child to sit on. The board, nine squares by nine squares, each roughly one and a half meters on a side, is laid out at the bottom of a bowl formed by the surrounding hills. Adults, in most cases clearly the participants' mothers, show the children where to sit. After a few adjustments and a general greeting on the public address system, the onlookers settle themselves on the bleacher seats, with their backs toward the slopping hills, and wait for the beginning of the game.
The game they are waiting for is shogi, a particularly Japanese version of chess that is second only to go as the most popular board game in the country. The antecedents of shogi are traceable through China and probably before that to India. Some of these earlier forms are still played elsewhere in Asia.
Shogi is at variance with the standard game of chess in a number of ways, but certainly the most important difference is the use a player makes of captured pieces. In chess, captured pieces are out of the game, but in shogi, each captured piece can fight for its captor and can be delivered directly to that part of the board where it can do the most damage. Shogi also differs from chess in that instead of moving a piece across the board, either player has the option of placing any piece on the board in any legal position. Use of these "paratroopers" makes the game faster and generally more exciting than chess. Victories in shogi are often landslide wins, in which the position of the player on the defensive crumbles in increasingly disastrous steps. As each piece is lost the damage is doubled, relative to chess, since the winner of the piece not only reduces his opponent's forces by one but increases his own by one. Losers are not just beaten, they generally are completely routed.
As the children take their seats a drum roll announces the players, in this case a grocery store owner from Tendo and a former Japan National Champion shogi player, both clad in traditional costume. The players take their places on a stage next to the living shogi board, seating themselves at a normal-size shogi board set up on a low table. As they begin to play, each move is announced by drum code and over the public address system and, more delightfully, is reproduced by the children on the large living shogi board. Each child stands up, lifts his koma on its standard and carries it to the new position, then scurries back to his chair and sits again. Some need a little help, but most of the children can understand the moves and appreciate the game. Things are different in
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