Teen whizz at ancient Japanese game loses after 29 straight wins
A JAPANESE schoolboy who won the heart of the nation after winning 29 consecutive games of a centuries-old board game lost his first professional match yesterday.
Sota Fujii, 14, was the toast of Japan after winning every single game of shogi – a Japanese version of chess – since becoming the nation’s youngest professional player last December.
The teen prodigy’s winning streak, however, came to end yesterday after he was defeated for the first time in an intense 11-hour match against Yuki Sasaki, 22.
Millions tuned in to watch live footage of the high-profile game, which took place in a small fourth floor tatami mat room with painted sliding screens at the Japan Shogi Association (JSA) in central Tokyo.
The shy-looking teen had earlier been greeted by crowds of fans and more than 100 journalists after arriving in a taxi, dressed in a dark suit with a blue rucksack on his shoulder.
During the match, Fujii, who trains himself with computer software, knelt stoically for hours, occasionally sipping tea or cooling himself with a white paper fan. He stopped only to eat a lunch of iced noodles and a dinner of fried chicken and rice.
The schoolboy’s first defeat came just days after he was feted by the prime minister Shinzo Abe for winning his 29th consecutive match – breaking a previous record of 28 wins set by a 57-year-old player in 1987.
Despite losing his first match, Fujii’s high-profile successes had already triggered a nationwide surge of interest in the game and led to record numbers of young children taking it up, according to Chihiro Nakamuro of the JSA.
“It is really very unusual for a player to get to this stage at the age of 14,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “He is the youngest of 160 professional players but it’s not common to qualify at such a young age. Some media say that Fujii thinks like a PC which is why he won 29 games after becoming a professional.”
She added: “The number of people playing shogi in Japan has been in decline since peaking in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s.
“But due to Fujii’s success, this is changing. The number of young players under 12 is now peaking in Japan. The rise of using a PC for training is also making it more popular.”
Fujii, the son of a businessman and a housewife from Aichi, north Japan, was five years old when he first started playing shogi after his grandmother gave him a set.
The schoolboy was quick to pick up the game, reportedly surprising teachers after taking just a year to master a 480-page shogi textbook. His mother, Yuko Fujii, told Kyodo News: “He gets really absorbed in things he loves, even to the extent that he cannot pay attention to other things.”