> An amusing one that I remember is when a magazine was not allowed to include the term shōgi daoshi—literally, “falling over like shogi pieces”
An amusing one on multiple levels. Standard shogi pieces don't fall over! They're not miniature statues like in Western chess, but flat reversible tiles [0]. It's like it was written by a Western journalist who needed to translate his idiom into Japanese.
I don’t have any shogi pieces handy—I’m more of a lapsed go player myself—but can’t they be stood on their ends like dominos? Image searches for shōgi daoshi in Japanese yield a lot of pictures like this:
I'm talking about the game codified in Europe in the late middle ages, and known as "chess" throughout the English-speaking world today.
It doesn't make sense to attribute its origins to Persia in the context of specifically distinguishing it from other shatranj/chaturanga derivatives, like shogi.
An amusing one on multiple levels. Standard shogi pieces don't fall over! They're not miniature statues like in Western chess, but flat reversible tiles [0]. It's like it was written by a Western journalist who needed to translate his idiom into Japanese.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Sh...