Learning shogi in 1976?

[bali...@yahoo.com]

I was looking at the PDFs of George Hodge's Shogi magazine.  The earliest issues were from 1976.

How did Westerners learn the game then?  Fairbairn's book hadn't been published yet, much less Better Moves for Better Shogi.

And there was no internet, so nobody went to Hidetchi's youtube channel.

Did they learn from Leggett's or Ohara's books?  Those seem pretty rudimentary.  The magazine articles don't seem to aimed at complete beginners.

[Larry Kaufman]

I don't believe that any Westerners were much beyond novice level in 1976 except for a few who lived in Japan. They could learn the basics from the mentioned books or from Japanese friends, but almost no one outside Japan had any incentive since finding opponents was too difficult. 

I learned shogi in 1977 from Mark Rosenberg, who learned from 

Hodges' magazine. Mark passed away about 3 months ago from cancer, age 77. I took it up very seriously even though Mark was my only opponent for 2 years. It soon became clear to me that no western   player outside Japan was at my level in 1980 or 1981 since I won all games in the international tournaments in

England those years, so I began month long annual trips to Japan to learn the game properly, eventually reaching 5 Dan. 

In the last century you either had to live in Japan or visit often to become strong. It's a different world now.

Larry 

Kaufman

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[captbirdseye]

It's a bit later than 1976, But I suspect that a significant number of Westerners may have learned Shogi using

John Fairbairn's Shogi - How to Play. This was published by the Shogi Association (ie: George Hodges) in 1979.

It's a 24 page, A4 size booklet/pamphlet which is still an excellent  introduction to the game for new players. 

My belief (based on nothing other than 'guesswork') is that this was a test-run for Fairbairn's later Shogi for 

Beginners. One of the highlights for me is the 200 or so Shogi proverbs listed in a panel on the final page...

FWIW, I picked up on Shogi in ~1966 when my martial arts instructor returned from a trip to Japan, bringing with 

him a dozen sets of this chess-like game with funny squiggles on all the pieces...

[Charlotte Hands]

Hello,

I am George's granddaughter, we still have copies of John Fairbairn's Shogi for beginners available to purchase via  shogi-variants on eBay. we will also be adding in the variants and shogi sets to purchase in the future. 

Charlotte (on behalf of Angela Hodges)

[Russ Williams]

FWIW:
coincidentally I just saw a cover of issue 24 (May 1974) of the UK
magazine Games and Puzzles, and it has an article on Shogi by Trevor
Leggett, so I suppose some people in UK might have learned the basics
from that article. (But I have not seen the article itself, and I
don't know any more about it.)

cover seen in this photo:
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7309120/tonyboydell

cheers,
Russ

[gh...@mistral.co.uk]

I'm pretty sure there was an article on Shogi in a computer magazine
in the UK in the late 70s or very early 80s. Possibly "Computing Today"
or "Personal Computer World"?

Almost certainly not as early as 1976 though.

--
Adam Atkinson

[Angela]

My intro, here in the US, was through an article in Games magazine in the late eighties. Somehow stumbled across a Games Gang edition of the game in a local store.

Ang

Sent from my iPad

> On Jan 28, 2023, at 6:51 AM, gh...@mistral.co.uk wrote:
>
> I'm pretty sure there was an article on Shogi in a computer magazine

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[frank...@aol.com]

There is a book from former communist East Germany called "Zug um Zug, Die Zauberwelt der Brettspiele" (Move by Move, the Magic World of Board Games) by Heinz Machatscheck. It contains a chapter about shogi with the rules and basic techniques explained. Its first edition is from 1972; it was apparently a very successful publication as it saw six editions all in all, the latest in 1987 (s. link below). Somebody told me that based on this book there was even a circle of shogi afficionados in former East Berlin, who regularly met and played with self-produced sets. I could not find out any details about this, however.

Maybe there were similar publications and activities in the former Soviet Union?

Frank Rövekamp

Link to "Zauberwelt der Brettspiele", cheaply available in the internet:

https://www.zvab.com/servlet/SearchResults?kn=zauberwelt%20der%20brettspiele&sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-topnav-_-Results 

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[captbirdseye]

On Saturday, 28 January 2023 at 13:01:02 UTC angel...@comcast.net wrote:

Somehow stumbled across a Games Gang edition of the game in a local store.

The Games Gang did republish the pamphlet I referred to earlier in 1987. Maybe the set you found was linked 

with that North American edition?

[andrei....@gmail.com]

Publications about shogi, have appeared regularly in magazines since the 1850s. For example, I have a scan of the Russian magazine 1857, which contains a reprint (Russian translate) of the text about shogi from "Narrative of the expedition of an American squadron to the China seas and Japan, performed in the years 1852, 1853 and 1854, under the command of Commodore M.C. Perry, United States Navy" (you can easily find the pdf of this book e.g. https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb73408443).

Much publication about shogi, including detailed rules, began to appear after 1868 (for obvious reasons). In the 1870s, we find several articles (with examples of games) in German and Austrian magazines (e.g. authors Viktor Holtz (1874), Karl Himly (1879)) and books (e.g. Antonius van der Linde (1874, 1881)). A very good article about shogi (with examples of games) in English can be found in the book "Games and Ancient and Oriental and How to Play Them" (1892) by Edward Falkener. This book was reprinted several times, including in the 1960s.

I also know books in Russian about shogi of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and even in the newspapers of 1907 I found advertisements for the sale of Russified shogi sets. There is a print of the rules from this set, which contained examples of games played in a certain "Studio of useful games" in St. Petersburg, i.e. there was something like a board game club where they played shogi.

Andrei

суббота, 28 января 2023 г. в 20:38:29 UTC+3, captbirdseye:

[Shigeru trentasis]

Hiya everybody.

Here Frank, I didn’t know about the book you mentioned, as I don’t know German language.
But i found this set on Ebay few years ago, which I believed will be the set you're referencing ...

 IMG_20230128_233713.jpg

 IMG_20230128_233843.jpg

 IMG_20230128_233850.jpg

 IMG_20230128_233724.jpg

In the other hand, unfortunately for me... I was born the same 1976. 
and so, I couldn't learn the rules until mid 2006, but my first contact with the game became in late 1993~early 1994 while in Spanish TV Channel airing the Anime called "Ranma 1/2". where some characters playing both; 将棋と囲碁 [Shogi & Go]

But at these times the game name in the anime was "Ajedrez domino (Dominoes Chess)" so it wasn’t until "Naruto" (Manga I didn’t read, neither watched his anime adaptation). The same manga did Karolina learned about the game and rules from.

And because at those times I found that the Game of "GO" 「囲碁」 had already large been promoting since 1976, i decided to focused on spread the Shogi fondness in Spain.  Unfortunately I didn’t even find any trace of even Japanese residents who play shogi regularly. 

Missatge de frankroeve via SHOGI-L <sho...@googlegroups.com> del dia ds., 28 de gen. 2023 a les 14:32:

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