Tendo human shogi: Kamiki Ryunosuke

The main event for the Shogi festival in Tendo along the game of human shogi of Miura and Abe was the visit of the famous actor Kamiki Ryunosuke and the movie director Otomo.

Kamiki Ryunosuke is very young, he became 24 last week, but he has a long acting career. His first movie appearance was when he was 10 years old on the movie “Bayside Shakedown 2” and some more recent movies like Bakuman or Rurouni Kenshin but before that, he put the voice to many characters in anime movies like Spirited Away, Howl’s moving castle or the recent hit Your name (Kimi no na ha). He also has been in dozens of TV dramas. He is considered one of the best-looking actors in Japan and he has many fans all over the country so many women came to Tendo just for see Kamiki.

He is the main character in the movie of March comes in like a lion. He plays the character of Kiriyama Rei. A young boy that has become a shogi professional player in middle school (same as Fujii Souta did recently). Kiriyama lost his parents and his sister in a car accident when he was a kid and a friend of the family that was a professional player adopted him. Then, he started to play shogi and gets very strong. On his life, there is only shogi but it’s thanks to three sisters that help him to find some other important things like friendship and love.

The director of the movie, Ootomo Keishi (JP), attend also to this festival in Tendo. He has directed many TV dramas and movies like the trilogy of the Rurouni Kenshin.

On Sunday, I was able to get a media pass from the event organization so I take a lot of pictures on the stage.

From 11:10 started a little chit-chat with the city ambassador MC Satou Masahiro on the top stage. They talked about the movie, about the city and about shogi. How Kamiki received a training from a shogi player about how to take the pieces correctly.

Before the game, Kamiki and Otomo made their appearance again, this time on the shogi stage, for deciding who would play as sente with the furigoma (A furigoma 振り駒 ‘piece toss’ is used to decide who moves first. One of the players tosses five pawns. If the number of tokins (promoted pawns, と) facing up is higher than unpromoted pawns (歩), then the player who tossed the pawns plays gote 後手 ‘white’).

After the furigoma, there was time for the media to make a small photo session with Kamiki and Otomo. I was really lucky I got the media pass because the pictures were forbidden for the common people.

On the middle of the game, they made again a special appearance. It was not expected some people who came to the Maitsuru mountain had left already.

They spoke about the game with “Oda Nobunaga” and Kamiki gave his opinion about how the game was developing.