About sugoroku: Sugoroku are board games that resemble the ancient Indian game “snakes and ladders,” or the modern US commercial variant, “Chutes and Ladders.”
The game boards have paths, with clear starting and finishing points, and several players take turns throwing a die to move their pieces forward according to the number rolled.
The first to reach the finishing point wins.
Most versions have special rules for die rolls (e.g. roll a three and jump to a special tile)
and special tile rules (i.e., land on this tile and go back three places). In Japan, suguroku originated as a means of disseminating Pure Land Buddhism and the goal was to be reborn in the Pure Land. With the spread of consumer culture in the Tokugawa era, publishers created suguroku for travel and history. In the modern era, the range of themes exploded to include recreation, family life, politics, and education.
About this sugoroku: This game, entitled "The Great Victory of the Imperial Army in the China Incident sugoroku" 支那事変皇軍大勝双六, was a supplement to the January 1939 issue of the Japanese magazine The Housewife's Friend (主婦之友).
Like many modern sugoroku, it was designed to be played with family and friends on the first few days of the New Year.
The Housewife's Friend ran as a monthly magazine from 1917 until 2008 and, at its prewar peak in 1943,
circulation exceeded 1.5 million copies in a country with roughly 36 million women.
What explains the game’s enthusiast support for the war effort? The Housewife's Friend was the most conservative of the major Japanese women’s magazine,
so the game’s nationalist tone is unsurprising.
But from September 1937, the Japanese government aggressively censored negative accounts of the war,
so any depictions of civilian casualties or misbehavior by Japanese troops would likely have been suppressed.
Publication data on the game board itself reveals that it was submitted for government review on December 6, 1938, for release on January 1, 1939.
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