The panel for January (bottom right) befittingly depicts children sitting around a game board and playing sugoroku, making this piece a self-referential “ sugoroku within sugoroku.” Can you spot where the dice is?Īt the conference “ Putting the Figure on the Map: Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children” hosted by the Cotsen Children’s Library in September 2013, we offered a workshop on sugoroku in collaboration with Setsuko Noguchi, the Japanese Studies Librarian at the East Asian Library, Princeton University. The twelve picture panels are arranged by month, each showing a leisure activity in which children would commonly be engaged during that time of the year. The theme of this game board is children’s play. Kodomo Asobi Sugoroku (A game on children’s play), distributed as a supplement to Yōnen Gahō (Young children’s pictorial), vol. Government agencies and the military, educators, companies, and organizations have all appropriated the format for purposes beyond play, ranging from the dissemination of information and commercial advertising to literacy education, moral and political socialization, and militarist propaganda targeting children and adults alike. Still, sugoroku remained a cross-age entertainment for the first half of the twentieth century. It became a tradition on New Year’s Day for children to play sugoroku, which children’s magazines distributed as supplements to their January issues. Child-oriented sugoroku grew as commercial publishing for young people expanded during the twentieth century in Japan. In fact, adults used to play the game, a simple dice-based contest, for gambling. Sugoroku did not originate as a children’s game. E-sugoroku (“e” meaning picture), a variety that features illustrated game boards, became popular among Japanese commoners in the late seventeenth century. The Japanese board game, sugoroku (すごろく or 双六), can be traced back to the twelfth century. Cotsen Children’s Library houses approximately 300 Japanese boards games published from the nineteenth century through the 1950s, a rare collection comparable to the few existing in Japan.