Go (Igo) and Shougi Go and Shougi Both go and shougi are two-player board games. Go is played with black and white stones on a 19 x 19 grid board with 361 intersections. The players alternate in placing stones on intersections and the player who captures the most territory wins. With the nearly infinite variations of moves possible, go is a highly intellectual game enjoyed by 10 million Japanese of all ages from grade school children to retirees. Professionally the game is played under the auspices of two organizations, the Nihon Kiin and the Kansai Kiin. Today there are approximately 500 professional go players in Japan, 400 of them in the Nihon Kiin. Shougi is an Oriental version of chess. Each player has 20 pieces, and the object of the game is to capture the opponent's king. Widely played since ancient times, shougi remains popular today with an estimated 20 million adherents of the game in Japan alone. As with go, shougi players are ranked by skill level. The Japan Shougi Association is made up of around 170 professional shougi players of the fourth rank and above (approximately 30 of them retired). There are about a dozen major shougi tournaments each year, primarily sponsored by the newspaper companies. Both go and shougi are believed to have been introduced into Japan in ancient times by Japanese emissaries and monks to China. Shougi traces its origins back all the way to India. In the Edo period, the Tokugawa shougun-ate established go and shougi masters and encouraged the playing of these games among the common people as intellectual exercises. Shougi and go sets are sold throughout Japan and range in price from a few hundred yen to hundreds of thousands and even millions of yen. Older households are likely to have go and shougi boards that have been passed down from generation to generation, many of them treasured as family heirlooms. @ |