If you finished March Comes In Like a Lion and found yourself searching for how shogi actually works, I want to start by telling you that your instinct is correct. The thing you sensed while watching, that the shogi in this show is not decoration, that there is a real world underneath it with real stakes and real rules, is true. The professional system the story is built on exists. The brutal apprenticeship it gestures at exists. The specific quality of silence in a serious game exists, and the show renders it with unusual care.
I can vouch for some of this firsthand. I’m a Japanese amateur 2-dan who learned the game from my grandfather as a kid, worked my way up through online play and shogi dojos, and now runs a community in Japan that helps younger beginners into the game. I am not a professional, and later in this article I’ll explain exactly how wide the gap is between someone like me and the people this anime is about, because that gap is one of the things the show quietly gets right. My job here is to stand between the screen and the board and tell you which parts of what you watched are faithful to the world I play in.
This article covers what the show is, how real its shogi is, which other shogi anime are worth your time, and what to do if watching made you want to play. Spoilers are kept to premise level throughout.
What March Comes In Like a Lion actually is
March Comes In Like a Lion (3-gatsu no Lion) is based on the manga by Chica Umino, the author of Honey and Clover. The anime adaptation aired on NHK in Japan across two seasons from 2016 to 2018, 44 episodes in total, produced by studio Shaft. As of July 2026 I won’t pretend to know the licensing situation in every country, so check your regional streaming services for current availability.
The premise, kept short and in my own words: Rei Kiriyama is a seventeen-year-old professional shogi player. He turned pro while still in middle school, which within the story marks him as a prodigy, and he lives alone in Tokyo, estranged from the family that raised him after his parents’ death. Shogi is his income, his identity, and the thing that isolated him. The counterweight to that isolation is the Kawamoto family, three sisters who more or less adopt him one dinner at a time.
That framing is why people who don’t care about board games love this show, and why calling it a “shogi anime” undersells it. It is a story about depression, grief, and found family in which shogi happens to be the protagonist’s entire livelihood. But here is the thing I want to insist on as a player: the shogi is not a backdrop that could be swapped for tennis. The pressures on Rei are the specific pressures of the actual Japanese professional shogi world, and the show is diligent about that world. Which brings us to the interesting question.
How real is the shogi?
Very. Not in the sense that every match is a documentary, but in the sense that the institutions, the stakes, and the texture of play are all drawn from life. Let me walk through the pieces of that world as someone who lives next to it, close enough to see it clearly, nowhere near strong enough to be inside it.
Professionals are a different species, and the show knows it
In Japan, “professional shogi player” is not a vibe or a self-description. It is a formal status administered by the Japan Shogi Association, and it begins at the rank of professional 4-dan. Note the word professional there, because dan ranks come in two entirely separate ladders. My 2-dan is an amateur rank. A professional 4-dan, the lowest rung of the pro world, would beat me effortlessly, and I mean that literally: strong amateurs like me lose to low-ranked professionals even at large handicaps. One of my prouder days at the dojo was beating three 2-dan opponents in a row. Against anyone in Rei’s world, that résumé is a rounding error.
I tell you this because it calibrates everything in the show. When characters treat a teenage professional as extraordinary, they are not exaggerating for drama. The pipeline that produces professionals is one of the harshest talent funnels in any game on earth.
The Shoreikai: the apprenticeship the show is haunted by
That pipeline is the Shoreikai, the JSA’s training league. Talented kids, usually the strongest child player anyone in their prefecture has ever seen, enter it around elementary or middle school age. Inside, they climb a ladder of internal ranks by beating each other, and only the top finishers of the final league are promoted to professional 4-dan. A tiny number of new professionals emerge each year from the entire country.
And there is a clock. Roughly speaking, if you have not made 4-dan by around age 26, you are out. Not demoted, not benched: out, with your childhood and adolescence spent on a game that will now not employ you. Many of the strongest shogi players Japan produces in any given decade are Shoreikai washouts, players who would crush every amateur in their city and still didn’t make the cut.
Once you know this, the emotional register of March Comes In Like a Lion snaps into focus. Every adult professional Rei faces survived that funnel. Every one of them watched friends age out. Rei going pro in middle school means he cleared, as a child, a bar that grown men grind against for a decade and miss. The show’s reverence and resentment around his talent is exactly how that world talks about its prodigies. And this is not fantasy calibration: pros who debut in middle school are historically rare in real life, a handful in the game’s modern history. The most famous recent example is Sōta Fujii, who turned pro at fourteen in 2016, the same year the anime began airing, and went on to dominate the title scene. Reality, if anything, has been outdoing fiction.
Titles, two-day matches, and the sealed move
The pinnacle of the professional calendar is the title system: a set of major crowns (Meijin and Ryūō are the most prestigious) that are defended in long championship series against a challenger who has fought through a qualification cycle. The most important title games are played over two days, with the position sealed overnight: the player to move writes their move down secretly rather than playing it, so neither side can burn the night analyzing a known position. Matches are held at traditional venues, players in formal dress, a recorder writing down the game score, time budgets measured in hours per player.
When the show slows down for a title match and treats it like a siege, that is not dramatization. A two-day game is a physical event. Players describe losing weight over a title series. The ceremonial weight the anime gives these games, the sense that a room has been arranged around two people thinking, matches every account from inside that world and every broadcast I’ve watched.
The sound of the room
Here is the detail I most want anime-first viewers to know is real: the sound. A serious shogi room is nearly silent, and into that silence, each move lands as a sharp snap of piece against board. Strong players place pieces with intent, and the sound carries information: confidence, aggression, resignation to a forced line. In my own dojo games I’ve felt time pressure change the room’s acoustics, moves getting faster and louder as byōyomi, the countdown clock, starts eating at both players.
Two more textures the show renders faithfully. First, byōyomi itself: when your main time runs out, you get a fixed number of seconds per move, counted aloud in formal settings, and playing under that count is its own skill and its own dread. Second, the culture around losing. In shogi you resign by saying so, clearly, out loud, and then, in one of the game’s best traditions, both players typically stay at the board and review the game together. This post-game analysis, the kansōsen, means you end every game by rebuilding it with the person who just beat you. It is the single most educational habit in shogi culture, and it costs the loser something every time. When the show lingers on the moments after a resignation, it is lingering on a real ritual.
So: how real is the shogi? The institutions are real, the stakes are real, the sensory world is real. What the show adds is interiority, and that is what fiction is for.
Other shogi anime worth knowing
March is the peak of the genre, but it is not alone.
The Ryuo’s Work Is Never Done! (Ryūō no Oshigoto!), a 2018 anime adaptation of Shirow Shiratori’s light novel series, comes at the professional world from the opposite tonal direction: a sixteen-year-old holder of the Ryūō title takes on a nine-year-old girl as his disciple. It is a comedy first, and considerably more otaku-flavored than March, but it is built on the same real scaffolding, title matches, the disciple system, the gravity of the Ryūō crown, and it clearly loves the game. If you want the same world played for warmth and jokes rather than ache, this is the one.
Shion no Ō (2007–2008) is the genre’s odd, interesting elder: a shogi anime crossed with a murder mystery, following a young female player who lost her voice in childhood and communicates her fierceness entirely through the board. It is older and harder to find, but it explores a corner the other shows don’t: the women’s professional scene, which in real life is a separate system with its own titles.
If your interest is less “shogi specifically” and more “Japanese mind sports through anime,” this same pipeline exists for riichi mahjong, with its own canon of shows that pulled Western players into the game. I’ve written about that lineage in the anime that brought riichi mahjong to the West.
From the screen to the board
Now the practical part, because if the show lit the fuse, the game itself will not disappoint you. Shogi is, in my biased but experienced opinion, the best of the chess-family games: captured pieces return to the board in your opponent’s hand, so the game never dries up into empty endgames, and the attack never fully stops.
Here is the path I’d recommend, in order.
Learn the rules properly. You do not need Japanese, and you do not need talent, and you certainly do not need the Shoreikai. Our guide to learning shogi from scratch is written for exactly the reader this article has: it covers the board, all eight pieces, promotion, drops, and gets you to your first real game within the week. That is the single main door, and everything else follows from it.
If you already play chess, you have a head start and a few habits to unlearn. Our shogi for chess players guide maps every piece to its chess cousin and explains why drops change the character of the game more than any rule difference you’ve encountered in a chess variant.
Try tsume shogi early. Tsume shogi, checkmate puzzles, is the training food of the entire shogi world; every player in the culture the anime depicts, from dojo kids to title holders, grows up solving them, and pros keep solving them for life. They are also weirdly meditative, and you can start with one-move problems on day one. Our tsume shogi for beginners guide explains the rules of the form and works through your first puzzle.
One last thing. The show is honest that shogi, at the professional level, is a hard and sometimes cruel world. Please don’t let that transfer onto the game itself. For the rest of us, shogi is what it was when my grandfather first set the pieces in front of me: a deep, generous game you can enjoy at any strength for a lifetime. Rei’s burden is professional shogi. What’s waiting for you is just shogi, and it’s a gift.