Episode summary
The story of how Tayvin learned to play Shogi — real conversation, real vocabulary.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hey there, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. In this episode, I will share with you the story of how I learned to play Shogi. Shogi is a game similar to chess which originated in Japan and has been around for more than a thousand years. It is a tactical game with complex strategies that require a lot of skill and planning to play well. In Japan, Shogi is a well-respected game with an impressive competitive scene. Professional Shogi tournaments are broadcast on national television, and professional players can make millions of yen (or hundreds of thousands of dollars) a year from tournament winnings. In the ranking of Shogi Players, anything below the rank of 3-dan is an amateur, and 4-dan all the way up to 9-dan is a professional ranking. With that brief explanation out of the way, let’s get to the story.
I had been living in Osaka for a few months when I got a call from headquarters telling me that I had been transferred to a new city. I would be moving to the city of Tanabe in Wakayama prefecture. Tanabe is a coastal town with a strong fishing industry. It’s not a very large city, as many Japanese people would refer to it as rural, but it is beautiful and has a nice relaxing atmosphere.
It took a few weeks to adjust. In Osaka everyone was busy and it was crowded all the time. In Tanabe things were slow, it was rarely crowded, and people had more time to talk to a giant strange foreigner trying his best to learn Japanese. I really grew to love living in Tanabe.
One quiet Monday afternoon my companion and I had a break from our normal volunteer work, and we were wanting to find a place to play a game. Specifically, we wanted to learn to play the board game Go. This is a very old very popular two-player board game from China where you try to capture territory using colored stones. We had never played before and didn’t understand the rules, so we were looking for someone who would be willing to teach us the basics. We went down to the local Go salon, a place where people gather to play the game, and started asking around. Nobody at the salon was willing to teach us, but they gave us the address of a man who would.
We walked over to the address and found a very sad-looking house. From the outside, it looked abandoned. It was old and in disrepair, but we decided to knock anyway. We waited at the front door for a minute in perfect silence before it suddenly slid open. Standing in the doorway was a slender man wearing a gas mask and covered in dust. Behind him, the inside of the house seemed to be destroyed. The floor was ripped up, walls knocked down, and a haze of dust and smoke hung in what used to be a living room.
Unsure of what else to do, we told the man that we had come here on the recommendation of the men from the Go salon, and that we were looking to learn how to play. He looked us up and down, and gestured for us to come in. We followed.
Walking through the house with our shirts covering our mouths, we saw that it was not abandoned nor in disrepair but in the process of going through very extensive remodeling. They were just in the initial stage of tearing most of it down before they could begin to build it back up. The man led us to the lone remaining room that was still intact. Protected from the dust by a large fan, the room was secreted away underneath the staircase. The man took off his gas mask, and we finally got to see his face. He seemed to be in his late sixties or early seventies, but with relatively few wrinkles and very intelligent eyes. He brought out a big 19×19 game board and two containers filled with black and white stones respectively. Almost faster than I could follow he began to place stones on the board and recite the rules for Go.
“The rules for Go are simple, and the game is easy to learn,” he said in Japanese after about a minute of explanation. “Do you like Shogi?”
I had never played Shogi before, but I played Chess a lot when I was younger and really liked it. I told the man this and he seemed to get excited. He quickly moved the Go board off the table and brought out two Shogi boards, one for me and one for my friend. He quickly reviewed the rules with us while setting up the boards. He placed all twenty pieces on our sides of the boards, but only 12 pieces on his. I knew that, like Chess, in Shogi both players usually start with the same number of pieces. He was going to play my friend and me, at the same time with an eight-piece handicap. Not only that, but he was missing his most powerful pieces!
To my great surprise, he beat us both quickly and easily. He didn’t even need to think about his moves, it was so fast. But, it seemed as if we had impressed him because he invited us back to play the next week. We came again and again for weeks to be taught by him until finally my friend and I won! A single game. Where he was playing the two of us simultaneously and had a massive handicap. But, still. We won.
On that first day meeting our mysterious Shogi instructor we exchanged business cards. However, I couldn’t read Japanese very well at the time. So, after many weeks of learning from him, I finally decided to use my dictionary to look up some of the characters on his business card. He was a 7-Dan professional Shogi player!
Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed my story. I still practice Shogi and have even learned to play Go. Have you ever played Shogi? Do you like strategy board games? Let me know by commenting or sending me a message. If you’d like to read along with the audio of this podcast you can find a link to my website in the description. I have uploaded the transcripts for all of my episodes of this podcast to my website and will continue to post them there in the future. If you have any English questions, or just want to have a fun conversation feel free to schedule a lesson with me on iTalki! I look forward to talking with you. Until next time. Have a wonderful day.
Liked this one?
72 expressions from both seasons, with the story behind each one.