Rio Olympics ended on the 21st August, 2016.

Many athletes made a strong impression on the nation, such as Kaoru Icho who became the first Japanese woman to win four consecutive Olympic titles, Ayaka Takahashi and Misaki Matsutomo who are doubles badminton players.

Since I used to play tennis, personally speaking, I was deeply impressed with Kei Nishikori won the medal for the first time in 96 years. How about you? Did you enjoy it?

By the way, as you know, Olympics is a great sports event that athletes compete physical performance sand strength in individual or team sports, such as soccer and athletics. Did you know there is a sports event “World Mind Sports Games” called “Olympics of mind”? It is an international competition for games of mental skills and mind sports.

World Mind Sports Games is a quadrennial sports event instigated by the International Mind Sports Association, uniting five traditional mind sports: Chess, Xiangqi, Go, Bridge, and Draughts.
As we introduced before in this blog, Shogi has the same origin of Chess and Xiangqi and resembles them. So, Shogi is also considered as one of mind sports.

As I mentioned in the past post, in China shogi is taught in gym class. And our president, Nakakura often uses the expression of “my brain is sweating”; “I feel my brain is sweating during a Shogi game.”

The first World Mind Sports Games was held in Beijing, China 2008, about two months after Beijing Olympics. And the second one was in Lille, France 2012. The second events was not held in the same host of Olympics. This year, the games were originally planed for later in 2016, but “efforts are now under way to seek organizers for 2017” said International Mind Sports Association. I do hope that in 2020 when we will have Tokyo Olympics, Shogi will be included as one of competition events. It is wonderful if we have the fourth World Mind Sports Games in Tokyo after 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

In our blog, you can find more information related to Traditional Japanese culture including Shogi and parenting.