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Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

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Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#91

Post by Try1275 »

_def wrote: post #40
rtpg wrote: post #19

One thing that kinda sucks in Tokyo in particular is a dearth of just chill public spaces. I think Go and Shogi both benefit from incumbent status, with club spaces and the like existing. Chess meetups right now seem to be relegated to city community spaces (glad they exist!). But I was real jealous when I was in Brisbane for a bit and visisted a chess meetup that was just happening in a cafe. Also saw some kids play…

The concept is called third place and I think it's super beneficial to any city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Very interesting.

> Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, stoops and parks. In his book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

I wonder if there is an online example as well for something like this. I was tempted to say something like forums but I don't think that's the case.

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#92

Post by vintermann »

baby wrote: post #77
Jach wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even convinced Go is all that popular in Japan compared to Shogi or Mahjong. Even Gomoku (five in a row, no capture rule) seems more popular. I can't really say anything about the popularity of go salons since I have yet to visit one but I can't help but notice that the game is never included as a minigame in Japanese titles like the Yakuza series (which has all sorts of other board minigames) or even Clubhou…

Watching One Piece on Netflix made me realize I really want to see an adaptation of Hikaru no Go on the screen. What a fantastic manga.

What I really liked about the anime, assume it's the case in the manga too, was the sheer number and diversity of regular, older people.

Obviously they weren't trying to paper over that it was mainly an old person's game in Japan at the time (I would assume it still is, too). But that didn't make it seem less appealing.

Also, the portrayal of foreigners in that series is worth a study in itself.

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#93

Post by vintermann »

jononomo wrote: post #89

I just watched a tutorial on Shogi and apparently the pieces are distinguished from each other by the Japanese-language symbols on them, which is a deal-breaker for me.

It's really easy to get used to. It's not in principle harder than learning the chess pieces. You don't have to learn what the symbols mean, any more than you do for Mahjong.

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#94

Post by uranusjr »

kmeisthax wrote: post #85
Jach wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even convinced Go is all that popular in Japan compared to Shogi or Mahjong. Even Gomoku (five in a row, no capture rule) seems more popular. I can't really say anything about the popularity of go salons since I have yet to visit one but I can't help but notice that the game is never included as a minigame in Japanese titles like the Yakuza series (which has all sorts of other board minigames) or even Clubhou…

I suspect the lack of Go in Yakuza or Clubhouse has more to do with the computational complexity of providing a decent computer opponent to play against.

There are multiple factors and I’m not sure what the exact cause is either. The relative difficulty to build a playable bot is one. A Go game being relatively long and taxing may be another. Go also traditionally has a reputation of being a game for bureaucrats and intellectuals, while Shogi being a more people’s game. The obvious parallel between the battlefield also makes Shogi more popular among samurais, who yakuzas draw a lot of inspiration from.

In general I think the two are of comparable popularity in Japan, but I wouldn’t be surprised if real yakuza people do like and play Shogi much more than Go.

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#95

Post by anuraaga »

I remember first coming to Japan and playing a round of chess with someone who had mostly never played but was very strong at Shogi. I'm not master or anything but had played a lot and was still generally confident in tactics, and had experience playing with new players, adjusting to keep a good game pace while still winning.

Got obliterated.

Also then started playing Shogi with him for the first time and while it didn't take that long to triumph with an all pawns handicap, after much effort finally reached being able to win including rooks/bishops. But it was obviously basically cheating since eventually you realize how easy it is to win with handicap be just putting 100% into defense.

Anyways, with those games to me it really felt that Shogi is the more strategic game, having similar mechanics to chess but being more dynamic. Chess in the end, even looking at GM matches, looks like much more pattern matching, i.e., tactics.

So my takeaway from that was that as much as I enjoy chess, Shogi is just the more complex game and its experts may just be able to defeat masters if they cared to because of the otherwise similar mechanics, as one of the anecdotes in the article.

Random share this is just personal but honest feeling from past experience and not an endorsement. Really fun memories.

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#96

Post by astrobe_ »

RadixDLT wrote: post #78
Cloudef wrote: post #8

They play shogi, go, and riichi mahjong

riichi is tnot the oritinal name, the japs use doupble (ii) in words to make them sound more western or latin

Not exactly. "riichi" comes from Mandarin, which might be related to "reach"[1] (can someone confirm?). It is an original word, although maybe a loan word, an the pronunciation might just have been kept faithful to the original because for all three languages (English, Chinese, Japanese) the length of vowels are sometimes meaningful (unlike e.g. in French).

[1] https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AB%8B%E7%9B%B4

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#97

Post by fomine3 »

rtpg wrote: post #54
jstanley wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the good reason?

If you're sitting there playing card games (especially if you're young and cash-strapped), you're gonna hog a table for a while and order the bare minimum. All the while there might be people lining up to come in, or even worse people deciding against coming in cuz it's full. This is more of a problem in high traffic areas ofc, but like on the weekend _lots of places_ are high-traffic. Ultimately the deeper problem i…

Karaoke box is an general paid solution. Everything except bring foods or sexual act is accepted.

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#98

Post by hakuseki »

tromp wrote: post #55
hakuseki wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How were these numbers arrived at?

I think the numbers are taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity We discuss the numbers for Go in the introduction of our paper https://matthieuw.github.io/go-games-number/AGoogolplexOfGoG...

So to summarize, the game tree complexity is estimated by estimating the branching factor and the game length, and raising the former to the power of the latter.

I find it slightly odd that the game length is calibrated to "reasonable" games but the branching factor is not.

If the goal is to estimate the number of possible games of go, then the calculation would be dominated by the number of long games rather than the number of short games, and very long games are possible.

If the goal is to estimate the number of "reasonable" games of go, then the branching factor should also be much smaller, as most possible moves are not reasonable. Perhaps the logarithm of the branching factor could be estimated as the entropy of some policy model such at that of KataGo.

P.S. I am happy to have received a reply from the mighty Tromp!

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#99

Post by 0_____0 »

Try1275 wrote: post #91
_def wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept is called third place and I think it's super beneficial to any city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Very interesting. > Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, stoops and parks. In his book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place. I wonder if there is an online example as well for something like this. I was tempted to say somethi…

For the younger generations Fortnite has a third-place vibe, which is fascinating to me as someone that played FPS as a youngin and never considered using them primarily to socialize

Re: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

#100

Post by no_wizard »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #27

The article does give this away early, but the answer is "no, chess is popular but not (yet) for the western variant". AFAIK this is same for all East Asian countries. That does make me wonder if chess (or more accurately, all games thought to originate from Chaturanga) is the first ever internationally distributed game.

Chess exploded in China though. They even have national state sponsored teams now
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