Sudoku Asian tour to be held in Shizuoka; Japan’s 1st time hosting int’l puzzle event

SHIZUOKA — The Asian Sudoku Championship, hosted by the Japan Puzzle Federation, will be held here on Jan. 28, with 75 participants from 11 countries and regions joining the first international sudoku competition to be held in Japan.

Sudoku is a puzzle in which a nine-by-nine grid is filled with numbers from 1 to 9, without using the same number twice in each row, column and each of the three-by-three boxes inside the grid. There are magazines dedicated to the puzzle, and the Mainichi Shimbun carries one sudoku in every edition.

Looking outside Japan, the number-placement puzzle became popular in Britain in around 2005 and now has a fan base in over 100 countries. The sudoku world championship started in 2006, and group tournaments were introduced the following year. The Japan Puzzle Federation sends players to the world competition almost every year.

The Asian championship started seven years ago and has been held across Asia. It consists of individual matches and group rounds with teams of four, ranked in both cases by total score.

The upcoming event is sponsored by groups including the Mainichi Newspapers Co. and Shizuoka Prefecture Mainichi-kai, and will held at the entertainment complex Artie in Shizuoka’s Aoi Ward. It will welcome players from Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan. Outside Asia, one player each from the Czech Republic and France will also compete as unofficial participants.

Prominent sudoku players from across Asia are scheduled to compete, including Ken Endo, a member of the Japanese team which clinched the world championship in Canada last fall.

Shizuoka was picked to host the Asian tournament thanks to efforts by the Shizuoka Prefecture Mainichi-kai, a local Mainichi Shimbun delivery group. It hosts “Mainichi college” seminars where Mainichi Shimbun reporters and other experts hold talks on various topics including politics and economics. In November last year, the group invited former sudoku world champion Kota Morinishi and Japan Sudoku Association Board Chair Yoshibumi Goto for public talks as part of its efforts to expand people’s interest in the puzzle.

The group also asked the Japan Puzzle Federation to bring an international event to Shizuoka. The federation took into account factors such as accessibility from overseas, whether the city had facilities suited to host a championship and hotel availability, and apparently concluded that Shizuoka could do the job.

Yuki Kajihara, one of the federation’s directors, commented, “It’s not well known in Japan that sudoku can be a competition, so I hope more people become aware of that through having an international championship here.”

(Japanese original by Yoshiki Koide, Shizuoka Bureau)