Sugoroku: Board games of the Edo era

[Charles]

I picked up the NYTimes today, and in the arts section was a lovely ukiyo-e by Hiroshige II, and a fascinating (but brief) story of board games from the Edo era. I wish you could see the full page print version of this ukiyo-e, the online image really doesn't do it justice. I'll include a small part of the image here.



Pass Go, Collect a Ticket to Paradise
Five hundred years before Nintendo sent the Mario Brothers hopping around the world, Japanese artists were creating sugoroku, or games in which players zoom across a grid or track. The earliest surviving examples, hand-painted for aristocrats, mix Chutes and Ladders with Buddhist cosmology; die rolls determine whether someone ascends to the paradise known as Pure Land or faces Emma, the guardian of hell. By the 18th century, advances in printing made sugoroku a popular pastime, and the games took on secular themes like sumo wrestling and kabuki drama.
Travel was another theme of sugoroku, as in "Famous Views of Edo,'' an 1859 specimen by Hiroshige II on view in "Asian Games: The Art of Contest" at the Asia Society. A disciple of one of Japan's best-known woodcut masters, and widely known for his landscapes, Hiroshige II rendered Edo, now Tokyo, with exquisite complexity. Yet the game is as basic as Candy Land: pieces move counterclockwise, more or less, around a circuit of 54 shrines, gardens and other major sights marked by numbered red cartouches...

[tatsujin]

Excellent find Charles,

I'd love to see one of these games in person. Medieval monopoly eh where you fight for external happiness - brilliant!

[Charles]

Want more? Try this page (Japanese only, warning: set your browser to EUC encoding)

http://library.u-gakugei.ac.jp/lbhome/sugoroku.html

Apparently you can zoom in and look closely if you use FlashPix or other weirdo browser plugins.

You might be surprised, many ukiyo-e prints are still relatively affordable, and these sugoroku were mass produced, so I'm sure there are plenty of these still around.

[tatsujin]

Thanks for that man,

The games seem pretty advanced, might try and source one up while I'm over here, should help with my Kanji

[Charles]

I wouldn't recommend these for kanji practice. They're Edo-jidai kanji, which are not easily readable even by modern Japanese native speakers. Sure, most of the kanji for place names haven't changed, but almost everything else has. You also might note the horizontal legend on the top, which reads right-to-left. I've only met one person who could read all the kanji in ukiyo-e, she was a Chinese woman with an MA in Art History from Geidai.

[Mulboyne]

Asia Society: Sugoroku - Japan's Backgammon

...Japanese sugoroku follows the same rules as backgammon; the initial configuration of pieces, or stones, is also identical...Sugoroku is the oldest known board game in Japan. It enjoyed great popularity from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Sugoroku gradually began to decline after the seventeenth century...Gambling with dice became more popular than sugoroku, perhaps because the results were immediate, reflecting the quickened pace of life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. E-sugoroku, thanks to interesting themes and innovative pictorialization, came to overshadow sugoroku, while board games of strategy (such as go and shogi) became popular.

Suguroku.net

Welcome to the SUGOROKU-NET page promoted by Tsukiji Sugoroku Museum. Sugoroku is a game with which you can step one block by one from start to the end of various stories using a dice.Sugoroku has become popular about 300 years ago and still remains even today in Japan. There are so many fantastic, dramatic and a bit retrospective sceneries in Sugoroku. Please enjoy yourself in our museum

Kabuki Sugoroku Boards
Osaka Prints: Sugoroku Boards