Customer Reviews

Japanese Chess, the Game of Shogi

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This book is an absolute mess.

A full third of the book just covers the rules such as how the pieces move, capture and can be dropped. The explanations, however, are poorly worded and use all sorts of seemingly hand-drawn diagrams that are nearly indecipherable, even for someone such as myself who already knows all of the rules. The author also uses unconventional terminology, such as calling the "Lance" a "Spear." The diagrams also can't decide whether to be in English or Japanese, so each piece has a small English letter on the bottom with the top showing the Japanese character. This wouldn't be a problem, and could even help westerners recognize the Japanese except for the fact that small size combined with the poor printing resolution just makes the japanese characters look like blobs of ink (side note for anyone thinking I just can't read Japanese: this is not the case, I read and write Japanese just fine). Finally, the writing in general is also hard to follow and looks like the text was passed through translation software rather than being written or edited by someone fluent in English.

I won't say that a person can't get anything from this book, but from what I've pulled out so far any learning points that are in this book are also in all of the other texts by better authors, such as Fairbairn in Shogi for Beginners. The only difference is these other books explain the moves and rationale much more clearly and go quite a bit deeper, as well.