Chess in Tokyo, from Ueno to Yokohama
Chess in Tokyo lives in small rooms and back tables rather than big halls. Chess Center UENO opens on Thursday evenings and weekend afternoons, Meetup groups meet in a Kōenji burger bar, a Shibuya pub and a Kanda café, and clubs gather monthly in ward halls. Most national championships are played at Kyurian in Ōimachi, and Yokohama, Chōfu, Machida and Kashiwa keep clubs of their own.
Clubs 19
Tournaments 18
Places to play 47
Lessons 7
Chess960 in Tokyo
No Chess960 over a real board turned up in the Tokyo area. The Japan Chess Federation's calendars for 2025 and 2026, the club notices, the chess-results.com list for Japan and the FIDE list of rated events were all read for Chess960, Fischer Random and Freestyle, in English and in Japanese, and none of them carries such an event.
In Chess960 the pieces on the back rank start from one of 960 shuffled positions, so opening preparation counts for little and the game is decided at the board. Until a Tokyo club or bar puts it on its programme, it can be played online at ch960.com.
No over-the-board Chess960 event has been found in Tokyo, Yokohama or Chiba yet.
Reading a card
Each card is assembled from pages anyone can open: the Japan Chess Federation's club lists, calendars and notices, the tournament server chess-results.com, the FIDE list of rated events for Japan, Meetup group pages and the clubs' and schools' own sites. A card shows the date of its newest trace and quotes the page it comes from, often in Japanese.
Within a list the cards run from the newest dated trace to the oldest; the order says nothing about quality. Where no page answers a question the card reads "not stated by sources". What the status lines and the three source marks mean, and where the directory stops, is set out under method and sources.
A club, a bar night or a class we have missed?
Tokyo clubs often change halls from month to month and post their dates on Meetup, X or a blog. If a card is behind or a place is missing, a short note with a link to the page that shows it is enough.