Ō and Gyoku (王と玉と)
Kōda Rohan wrote this as Section 2 of his shogi essay collection Shōgi Zatsuwa (将棋雑話, often “Shogi Chatter”). It is known as 王と玉と (Ō and Gyoku / King and Jade). The short shogi essay discusses the history of the shogi king piece.
In Asakawa Zen’an’s essays, he mentions something from years ago, when I wrote an introduction for a shogi book by Ōhashi Sōkei. I wrote:
“The shogi piece called Ōshō (王将) has a very doubtful name. If it is a king, call it king. If it is a general, call it general. There is no reason to mix ‘king’ and ‘general’ in one name.”
So I checked old shogi books. In the shogi diagram books written by each head of the Sōkei line—from the founder through the fourth—both sides are written Gyokushō (玉将). The name Ōshō is not there.
So I think the gyoku piece is the main commander, and the Gold and Silver pieces are the assistant commanders. If that is so, then the names Gold General and Silver General also have a good reason, and it feels even more interesting.
Maybe later, after the fifth Sōkei, people did not like having both sides look the same. So they may have left off one dot on one side to make a difference.
When I told this to the current Sōkei, he said, “That must be right. Here’s why. Every year, on November 17, as part of the regular ceremony, we are ordered to play shogi at the castle. When we submit the game record, the old rule is to write Gyokushō on both sides, and not to say Ōshō. This was passed down in our family. Even now, we still write Gyokushō when we submit it, but we never knew the reason. Now it’s clear.” He said he even published the book he had written before under a new title, Shōgi Meigyoku, and put my introduction at the front.
That book still exists. And it really is wrong to turn “Gyokushō” into “Ōshō,” just as Zen’an said.
(Still, “Ōshō” is also an old common nickname. In an old diary called Yudono no Ue Nikki, in an entry dated Bunroku 4, May 5, it says that the Taikō, through messengers (Kikutei, Kanshūji, and Nakayama), ordered that the shogi “Ōshō” be changed and called “Daishō” (“chief general”). Dr. Hoshino found this and wrote about it. So calling “gyoku” “ō” did not start only after the fifth Sōkei.)
Also, Ō (王) and gyoku (玉) are not different only because of a single dot. Even the character 王 without a dot can be read as 玉. In old writing, 王 and 玉 were not very different.
If, in the character 王, the middle of the three horizontal lines sits closer to the top, that is the 王 of an emperor. If the three lines are evenly spaced, that is the 玉 of a jewel. So it is not a mistake to write one king piece as 玉 and the other as 王. The only mistake is calling it Ōshō instead of Gyokushō.
A great shogi master like Mr. Ono always calls it only “gyoku,” and has never called it “ō.” That is a way of keeping it correct.