Takodori's Entrance to Shogi World

Ajax shogi board(Aja-ban)

Here is Ajax shogi board(Aja-ban) created by かずひで. You can move any pieces on the board. The first button at the right side of the board is for flipping the board. The second one is for showing initial position. The third one is for editing tsumeshogi positions. Have fun!

Aja shogi board

Close-Up article about Habu is now available to read in The Japan TImes Online

It is a Mustsee if you are a shogi fan.

CLOSE-UP

YOSHIHARU HABU

Japan's king of the board

The archives of The Japan Times are paid service. I would recommend to copy it in your local disk if you need it later.

Koreeda's movie "Afterlife" has shogi scene.

There are lots of great movies with chess scenes inside the strory such as Casablanca, the Great Escape, From Russia with Love, Searching for bobby Fischer and so on. There are lots of Japanese made movies with shogi scenes as well but not many are avaialble to watch in the countries outside Japan. Today I would like to introduce a Japanese film with shogi scene which is sold in Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. It's directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. The title is "Afterlife". I laughed very much when I encountered the shogi scene of it recently.

For your reference, here are some review pages of this film.

IMDb(Internet Movie Database)

@Amazon.co.uk

@Amazon.com

Wikimedia Commons has Shogi category

I recently found that the Shogi category exists in Wikimedia Commons which is a database of more than one million media files to which registered users can contribute. Anyone can create your account through this page.

Shogi category has 73 media files related to shogi now which includes the photo of Kansai Shogi Kaikan(Branch of Nihon Shogi Renmei in Osaka prefecture), diagrams of initial set-up of various shogi variants, photos of real shogi tiles, diagrams of various Kakoi(castle) and so on.

There is no movie/animation files there yet. But I think those kind of files will be uploaded into the category sooner or later in the future.

Article about Shogi in Wikipedia was updated on Dec. 1

The following part you can see through the linked page below was added to the article about Shogi in Wikipedia(English version) on December 1.

Difference between revisions

As you see there, the added part mentions to Mino Gakoi. I'm creating a diagram which shows Mino Gakoi below.

Rikaichan - a popup Japanese-English/German/French/Russian dictionary

According to Daniel's post to shogi-l mailing list, Rikaichan is very useful when you read pages related to shogi written in Japanese on Internet. I think Daniel's mother tongue is German.

BTW, in order to read japanese sites I found very helpful a little
extension for Firefox called Rikaichan. With this, your mouse cursor
shows direct translation, much better then normal online translation. In
particular, shogi terms are given.

And here is Fabien's reply. He is a French shogi fan..

Thanks a lot for the tip Daniel! Quite helpful indeed.

Why don't you enjoy the free state-of-the-art tool as these two guys?

Firefox means Mozilla Firefox which is a free web-browser. You can download it through Mozilla's page.

For more details about Rikaichan, please refer to the page of polarcloud.com. Your Firefox browser can be equipped with Rikaichan through the page.

Now the replayable board can be seen through Mozilla Firefox

I've got a remedy. Now the replayable board using kif2swf can be seen through Mozilla Firefox as well as IE. The problem Nicola pointed out a few days ago was caused by WYSIWYG-tag correcting function of Internet Explorer. Using Mozilla Firefox when uploading a blog content prevents it from unnecessary HTML correction.

In addition,  Oujiminami, the creator of kif2swf,  has kindly accepted my suggestion that both Kings on the replayable board should be Gyoku(玉）.

Anyway, here is the replayable board again. I hope everyone including Mozilla Firefox users can enjoy replaying the game on it.

Test Entry of a replayable board

This is a test entry of the replayable board in flash file format using KIF2SWF. The game is a classic joking Joseki which ends with only 11 moves.

I hope everyone can enjoy the game using the board above without problem. If you have a problem using the board, please let me know in the comment field. Thanks.

Good Links to shogi information for you to visit

• Basic shogi information in English available on Internet(1)
• Basic shogi information in English available on Internet(2)

User comments playing shogi of Clubhouse Games for DS which might be worth reading

These two entries are very interesting to me.

chrisglass: Clubhouse Games  --- This entry includes the photo of shogi screen in Clubhouse Games for Nintendo DS. According to the photo, the pieces used in the software is a piece with one Kanji character on.

Re: Clubhouse Games -- Shogi - Other Nintendo WFC Games - Nintendo NSider Forums  --- I think Clubhouse Games is playing a part of increasing shogi population in the Western world.