May 14, 2025
Shogi in the Edo-Period (1600–1867): Glimpses of Real Life from the Ohashi Diaries
- 10:00 to 11:00
- Colloquium
- Max Planck Research Group (ASTRA)
- Frank Rövekamp
Abstract
Shogi, the Japanese cousin of Western chess, was recognized as a government sponsored art during the Edo Period. One of the houses entrusted with the pursuit of Shogi was the House of Ohashi. Successive headmasters of the house kept dairies of their activities from about 1660 thereby giving unprecedented insights into their daily life and the development and organization of shogi at the time. The talk will put the Ohashi dairies into the context of other sources, summarize their content and present selected events.
Biography
Prof. Frank Rövekamp is Director of the East Asia Institute of the Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
Contact and Registration
We welcome both internal and external guests. Registration is only required for physical attendance. For more information about the colloquium series, please contact Jacob Schmidt-Madsen.
Zoom link: https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/j/68564259061
About This Series
Asia is home to some of best known and longest surviving board games in the world. Backgammon originated in West Asia, Chess in South Asia, and Go in East Asia. The list goes on and can be expanded to include hundreds, if not thousands, of games that most people have never even heard of. Yet the history of their transmission, translocation, and transcreation across the Asian continent remains little explored and poorly understood. This owes in part to obvious barriers of culture and language, but also to a lack of communication between board game scholars. Even a cursory glance at the sources – whether textual, visual, material, or ethnographic – shows that they speak a common language that we as researchers do not.
The ASTRA colloquium series brings together board game scholars working with primary sources in a variety of Asian languages. It asks them to present their sources and discuss questions of context, structure, content, and language use. The goal is not only to establish connections between specific games and game cultures, but also between researchers and methodologies. The series is rooted in a larger project to build a database of ludic terminologies across linguistic glossaries in Asia. A special keynote lecture on games and language will be delivered by Alex de Voogt who has been instrumental in shaping the modern landscape of board game studies.