My Trip to Japan

My junior year of high school I had the oppurtunity to go to Japan with my dad. I was ecstatic. We visited Tokyo, Nara, Osaka, Hiroshima, Himeji, Miyajima, and Kyoto. Before the trip I hoped I would be able to find somewhere to buy an authentic shogi board. My dad and I traveled with a travel group with a pretty busy schedule so we didn't have a lot of free time to shop around. Around the 3rd to last day of our trip we were in Kyoto and I still hadn't gotten a shogi board. We stayed at the Kyoto Station Hotel and just a couple buldings down from the hotel was this the building where I'd find my shogi board. I first noticed it while walking by with my dad one morning. I saw 8 or 9 old men sitting and playing shogi, I immediately walked in and didn't know what to do with myself. There was a pretty thick language barrier, so my father and I kind of ended up just staring at these nine old men who looked a little confused as to why in the world some little American kid just wandered into their hangout with an ecstatic look on his face. Soooo anyway I ran back to the hotel and found our translator/tour guide, I brought him back to the shogi building and it all worked out. So as they were packing up the board and the pieces, another one of the old men motioned to me to sit down in a chair across from him and play. I was a little flustered but still totally on a high from the excitement. He obliterated me completely. So thats the story of how I got my first board, it's well used just the way I like it. Now I'd like to make my own.
Here are a couple pictures of my board and pieces that I got in Kyoto.

My Brief Story

I originally got into Japanese culture through movies. Before I was even in lower school, my grandmother used to show old Miyazaki movies like My Neighbor Totoro and Castle in the Sky. Now I am a huge fan of all the Ghibli movies and they rally bring back a great nostalgic feeling. Throughout middle school and high school I became more and more interested in Japanese culture. I came to really adore everything about Japan from cuisine to media to video games. I found out about shogi from some website that I was exploring and I thought it was very interesting. I have always liked logic puzzles and I enjoyed strategy games like chess so I was thrilled that there was a Japanese chess and I was motivated to learn about it. So as anyone in my generation would do to learn about something, I Googled it which led me to the all-knowing entity, Wikipedia. After reading the whole page I sought out another internet powerhouse to learn more about shogi, YouTube! I found HIDETCHI's channel, anyone wanting to learn how to play shogi I'd recommend checking out his channel. So anyway that's pretty much how I learned about Shogi, one of HIDETCHI's videos shows how shogi boards are made. I was inspired not only to make my own shogi board, but that's when I decided that collecting shogi boards and pieces would be a bit of a life long hobby of mine.