The man who saved Japanese Chess by blowing Western minds… Or?

I got dragged into one of those Wikipedia rabbit holes where you keep clicking one more link until you have 30 open tabs, all Wikipedia. This time, it was about the staggering variety of regional chess variants that all sprung from one game, Chaturanga, which developed in India in the 7th century, and spread both East- and Westward, mutating along the way into modern Chess and many other variants. That’s interesting from a historical perspective, of course, and from a Computer Science perspective, these Chess variants are interesting because while computers have eclipsed the best humans in Western Chess, some of the Asian variants of the game are much more computationally complex, despite not having more complicated rulesets. The ancient board game Go (which is unrelated to Chaturanga, and predates it) is perhaps the most complex of all popular strategy board games, and computers still play at an amateur level without handicaps. Much effort in the field of Artificial Intelligence has been spent trying to develop good algorithms to play these games at the level of strong human players.

The Japanese variant of Chess is called shogi, and is also more computationally complex than classical Chess. Shogi is unusual as Chess variants go, in that players are allowed to drop pieces they have captured from the opponent back onto the board and use them as their own pieces. The pieces are not distinguished by color, and except for the piece equivalent to the king, are the same for each side; who is controlling a piece is indicated by which way the piece is pointing. This brings us to the very possibly apocryphal story of the man who saved shogi from the oppressive American occupants. Here it is:

After the Second World War, SCAP (occupational government mainly led by US) tried to eliminate all “feudal” factors from Japanese society and shogi was included in the possible list of items to be banned along with Bushido (philosophy of samurai) and other things. The reason for banning shogi for SCAP was its exceptional character as a board game seen in the usage of captured pieces. SCAP insisted that this could lead to the idea of prisoner abuse. But Kozo Masuda, then one of the top professional shogi players, when summoned to the SCAP headquarters for an investigation, criticized such understanding of shogi and insisted that it is not shogi but western chess that potentially contains the idea of prisoner abuse because it just kills the pieces of the opponent while shogi is rather democratic for giving prisoners the chance to get back into the game. Masuda also said that chess contradicts the ideal of gender equality in western society because the king shields itself behind the queen and runs away. Masuda’s assertion is said to have eventually led to the exemption of shogi from the list of items to be banned.

Wow! Mind blown, or what? Unfortunately, when we do a little bit of academic source criticism, the only citation for this incredible story is a book by one Masuda, Kozo. Certainly this guy is an impartial source who would have no interest in embellishing his own role in history? Alas, I could find no other credible sources for this version of the story, although it’s a very good story, you have to admit. It is, however, a fact that the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, led by the SCAP himself, General Douglas MacArthur, sought to eliminate a variety of practices that they thought were too tightly tied to feudal or imperialistic ideology, including sports like judo and games like shogi. The book Mapping an American Empire of Sport repeats the story about the SCAP wanting to ban shogi, judo and kendo. It doesn’t confirm the incredible rhetorical heroics of Masuda Kozo, however. In place of traditional Japanese sports, MacArthur promoted Western sports, and was a fan of baseball in particular.

But the book makes a great point:

Ironically, the suspicions of Americans during their occupation of post-war Japan that associated sports and physical practices (judo, kendo and shogi) with Japanese ideological and spiritual beliefs closely echoed the inter-war Japanese governmental suspicions of Western sports practices as being infused with Western or American beliefs. In many ways, any physical movement, whether it is rule-bound or spontaneous, is a practice that is essentially an empty form that can be infused and associated with any values, ideology or spirituality, whether it is of Western or Eastern origin.

The Japanese easily adopted baseball and other Western sports by simply infusing them with traditional Japanese values, such as bushido (the way of the warrior, old Samurai philosophy). And of course, a board game like shogi or Chess is really just an abstract game manifested on a physical board with physical pieces. Today, it is played online, immaterially except in the form of ones and zeroes, as well as on the physical board. As an abstract game, it carries no political allegiances. We are free to interpret the game as we like. Whether Masuda invented his radical reinterpretation of Chess after the fact or actually delivered it as an apologia before the occupational government, it demonstrates just how much room there is to reinterpret a game and infuse it with any politics or ethics one wishes, when really it’s all just a few wooden pieces moved on a board with squares on it according to a simple, abstract set of rules.

The iconography of the game may superficially have ties to culture, but it is only slapped onto an abstract game. The ancestor of the modern rook was a chariot (the word rook comes from Persian, and is rather odd for an English word; in other languages, the piece is called Tower, which the piece more physically resembles in most chess sets), the ancestor of the bishop was an elephant. Quite a transformation, from animal to high-ranking preacher. Or perhaps not.

In any case, the SCAP was probably more concerned with the cultural practices and the ideology surrounding judo or shogi than with the actual iconography or rules of the game itself. One can play shogi without having a Japanese cultural background; one can perform a judo throw in basic training in the US army while devoutly believing that Japan deserved Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

History is written by the winners. And sometimes the writers of history want to make themselves winners, which I strongly suspect is the case with Masuda. Regardless, now, seven decades after the end of WWII, the number of shogi players is declining with no oppressive influence from the Americans. Yet the number of players of Go, a Chinese game also very popular in Japan, is on the rise.

(via http://science.tumblr.com/post/106498655950/the-man-who-saved-japanese-chess-by-blowing )