Youtube happened to recommend me news videos about a female shogi player who is taking the test to become regular professional as opposed to female professional. It seems in shogi there’re no female players who achieved such a feat yet. The latest English article about it seems to be this:
I’d like to direct your attention to the following part:
Without question, deep-running gender bias has traditionally discouraged women from taking up the game. Take, for instance, an interview in the January 1986 issue of the shōgi magazine Kishi sekai (Kishi World) with a retired male player, since deceased, who had this startling comment about women playing the game.
“Women aren’t cut out for shōgi. They’re more suited to simple games like go, mahjong, or golf. With a game like go, they just need to place the stones and forget about them; the complex back-and-forth of shōgi goes right over their heads. It’s a waste of time even trying to teach them. Women should stick to making miso soup. Take my wife, for instance. She doesn’t take the slightest interest in the game.”
First of all, it’s funny. But also the general tone, “right over their heads”, “for instance”, it’s definitely inspired by that Rick and Morty copypasta. Come on, 100%. They got a troll to translate the article. In the Japanese version of the article which I’d assume the original it’s worded differently. I mean, naturally, they didn’t have Rick and Morty in 1986.
碁は平面的だから女でもできる。しかし、将棋は立体的だから無理なんだ。
Go is flat so even a woman can play it. But shogi is three-dimensional so it’s impossible.
Checkmate, go players.
Anyway, if anyone knows anything about shogi, what’s going on there?
Well congratulations for her, i hope she makes it! I’m not familiar with pro shogi scene at all, but isnt it even smaller than with go? As in, far fewer professional shogi players than pro go players?
I don’t know about the number of pros, but I thought in terms of audience / amateur players shogi was bigger than go in Japan. Their title match video streams have way more viewers, but maybe that’s better broadcast management.
Five games, three wins to pass. And she lost two games already so she’s kadoban. Welp. The next game is October 13th, let’s hope she’ll collect herself.
Recently I’ve played a lot more Shogi than Go. It’s been fun to take up a new game have the experience of discovering so many new ideas quickly (it’s not so easy for me in Go after so many years to learn more).
First of all, it’s incorrect to compare go pros and Shogi Pros. Go professionals number over 500 in Japan. Shogi ‘pros’ are closer to the top 100 go players. Since only in the last few years has Fujisawa sensei consistently ranked in the top 100, it shows that there isn’t significant difference in female performance in IGo and Shogi. Obviously by 3-D he’s referring to dropped pieces, otherwise Judith Polgar would disprove his theory.
I correct myself to say that, Shogi pros are actually the top 200. So Shogi Women need to catch up. The thing is, Hikaru no Go would probably make more sense plot-wise as Hikaru no OuSho where Hikaru is a girl. But Shogi in its modern form wasn’t really a thing in the Heian era, haha