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BY LAUREN STOKES

In print | November 10, 2005

At the end of October, philosophy professor Alan Baker competed in the World Amateur Championship of Shogi, returning from Tokyo as a member of the winning United States squad.

Baker started a Swarthmore Shogi Club before his trip to Japan, and he proudly points out that it is the only college Shogi club in the U.S. Although it boasted only six members at the outset (a matter of practicality, Baker points out, as “we only had three boards”), the victory inspired quite a crowd to show up at last Thursday’s meeting of the Shogi Club. There, I joined a group of eager novices around the board in Kohlberg to watch Baker explain the rules of the game, which is essentially “Japanese chess.”

Shogi is, on the surface, very different from Western chess; it uses a nine by nine board, each player begins with 20 pieces spread out over three rows (nine in the front, nine in the back and 10 in the middle) and features flat uniform tiles with Japanese characters as identifiers instead of sculptural pieces.

Baker identifies the nine pieces in front as “logical pawns” that can only move one space forward at a time, prompting a chuckle from his philosophy students.

In the next rank of the board come the rook (a “flying car,” in Japanese) and the bishop, each with the same moves as its Western counterpart. Moving another rank backwards, the two lances (“aromatic cars”) are like rooks that can only move forwards, the two knights can only move forward two squares and across one (quarter-knights, in Western terminology) and the king can move exactly like a Western king. The two “silver generals” can move into any of the three squares in front of them or one square diagonally backwards and the “gold generals” can move one square in any direction but diagonally backwards.

Each piece promotes to a better piece (Baker explains that the bishop becomes a “super-duper bishop”) once it reaches the last three ranks of the board, but the crucial difference between Shogi and Western chess is this: Once you capture an opponent’s piece, it becomes your own to drop anywhere on the board and use.

Maxim Waldstein, club member, faculty spouse and University of Pennsylvania professor, explained, “Shogi seems to fulfill the dream of any amateur chess player: ‘If I had just one more piece, I would put it where I need it and I’d win,’… In chess, after a certain point you know you are doomed. In Shogi, in a similar situation, you may have a slightly better reason to hope for a better outcome.”

Waldstein also points out that despite the warlike connotations of Shogi, “it is actually not bloody. Nobody is killed or eaten; the pieces just change sides … this may also be related to the Buddhist idea of reincarnation, but I have not found any good historical or philosophical analysis of shogi so far.”

After explaining the rules, Baker challenges the whole knot of us to a game, generously handicapping himself by removing all of his pieces but the pawns, the generals and his king. We begin strongly, bringing our knights forward and opening up a path for our bishop.

“Is that a gold general, or a silver?” muses Lisa Spitalewitz ‘06, "because if it’s gold, that could be kind of bad." The Japanese characters confuse us, but this is something Baker assures us will change with time. “They’re still just a bunch of squiggles to me, but they’re characteristic squiggles … what you have to remember is that the gold general has a bigger hat.”

Without even knowing the meaning of the characters, Baker won his section of the U.S. Shogi Championships in New York City in April and was officially invited to join the U.S. team at the World Amateur Championships. Out of eight different teams, “the U.S. pulled off a surprise victory, beating Brazil in the final, and Sweden, France and Germany in earlier rounds … this is the first time the U.S. has made any significant mark on the international Shogi scene.”

Baker also competed in the individual tournament, but did not place; one of his losses was to a 12-year-old girl, an embarrassment until he considered that she had won a World Amateur Championship just a few months earlier.

Baker was also able to “fit in a bit of sightseeing, including a pre-dawn visit to Tokyo’s wholesale fish market to see the auctioning off and slicing up of a huge, $10,000 tuna … and several local Shogi clubs, full of old, chain-smoking Japanese men playing speed Shogi games and talking loudly throughout.”

Will more Swarthmore Shogi players be earning free trips to Japan in the future? The club’s original six members consisted of amateur champion Baker, experienced player Satoru Saito, partner of Professor Tomoko Sakomura, Waldstein, who had learned the rules over the summer, and George Yin ’09 and Adam Xu ’09 as the interested novices (now with two months under their belts, they were busy beating another group of newcomers at the other board). Baker is hoping to keep the mix of students, faculty and faculty spouses as the club moves forward.

Back at the board, the collective decision-making process of the novices is slowing down the game. I urge a nonsensical move “just to see what will happen,” we fret about Baker’s plans for the pieces he has captured from us, and Ronni Sadovsky ’08, thinking more about the game of Swarthmore than the game of Shogi, bursts out “Dammit! I came to a club and I liked it!” We do manage to check Baker once before we get checkmated.

World champion that he is, Baker’s win was expected from the start, but the result of the game reminds me of the old quip: If eight Swarthmore students can’t beat one professor, is this school getting stronger or weaker?

The group meets Thursdays at 4 p.m. at the Kohlberg coffee bar.

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