A women’s pro shogi player hoped to break a 100-year wall and become the first female professional in the country’s regular Japanese chess league. Sadly, it was not to be.
29-year-old Nishiyama Tomoka, a women’s professional shogi player, is a ranked 5-dan player in the Japan Shogi Association as part of the women’s professional players group. Players in the league are professionals when they achieve the rank of 4-dan and can rise to a rank of 9-dan.
The women’s professional group is distinct from the JSA’s professional group, which has only had male members since its formation in 1924. Both amateur and women professional players can become pros in the JSA’s professional group by passing the Professional Admission Test, originally established in 2006.
Before the test, pro group members had to rise through the ranks of the org’s apprenticeship system. The test was ad hoc until 2014 and conducted for amateurs, including those who had once been part of that apprentice system. In 2014, the Association formalized rules for applying and qualifying.
Do-or-die match
No female player has yet passed the exam to become a professional in the regular league. That looked like it might have changed this week. In the exam, Nishiyama had to win the balance of her five matches against five different pro shogi players. She went 2-2, making the last match a do-or-die moment.
Unfortunately, according to Nikkan Sports, Nishiyama lost in her last match to 4-dan player Mosegi Kanta, putting her at 2-3. That makes Nishiyama the second woman behind pro women’s player Fukuma Kana to fail the exam.
Nishiyama has been playing since she was five years old. She became a women’s professional in April 2021 and currently holds multiple women’s titles.
Nishiyama will be qualified to take the exam again after either earning 65% or better wins across 10 or more matches or ranking in one of the JSA’s official tournaments.
Historically, discrimination towards women led to the creation of separate leagues. Now, however, the barrier seems to be the sheer difficulty of the exam itself: since 2006, only five people – all men – have passed.
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