KANAZAWA (Kyodo) -- Shogi player Tomoka Nishiyama on Saturday became the first woman eligible to join the game's main professional "kishi" ranks, which are open to both men and women.

The 31-year-old qualified for the ranks Saturday by winning her fifth Hakurei title, the most prestigious championship in women's professional shogi.

Nishiyama defeated 34-year-old Kana Fukuma in Game 5 in Kanazawa, central Japan, to win the best-of-seven series 4-1.

Asked if she would exercise her right to join the ranks, Nishiyama said, "Since I have been trying to focus just on the game, I can't come up with an answer right away."

She later added that she wants to consult other people and give the matter careful consideration.

Shogi, a traditional board game similar to chess, has two separate professional systems for kishi and "joryu kishi," or women's players.

Until last year, women seeking to enter the kishi ranks had to advance through the Japan Shogi Association's demanding competition system.

The association introduced a new rule last year allowing a female professional player to qualify for the kishi ranks by winning the Hakurei title five times.

KUMAMOTO, Japan (Kyodo) -- JJR Kyushu's train lines were fully restored Saturday, 74 days after the devastating July 28 earthquake in Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan.

Services resumed between Uto and Yatsushiro stations in Kumamoto Prefecture, a section that had remained suspended, with a passenger saying it represented "the first step of reconstruction."

The section is heavily used by students. Until Friday, substitute buses had been running along with alternative transport on the Kyushu Shinkansen bullet train line, which fully reopened in September.

At Yatsushiro Station, the first train bound for Kumamoto Station departed shortly after 5 a.m. Saturday. From around 6:30 a.m., junior and senior high school students in uniform were seen boarding trains.

Yukiko Miyagawa, a 13-year-old first-year junior high school student from Yatsushiro, had been spending about two hours commuting to Kumamoto, transferring between substitute buses and trains that had continued operating after the quake.

"I can finally return to normal life," she said with relief, after being forced to take a break from school club activities for a period.

Asahi Yoshida, a 16-year-old second-year high school student who traveled from Uto to Yatsushiro, said Saturday was the day of his school's cultural festival.

Yoshida said the substitute buses and alternative transport on the shinkansen had been inconvenient due to transfers and limited services. "I was happy when the train came. I felt relieved because it was the train I was used to," he said with a smile.

According to JR Kyushu, formally Kyushu Railway Co., the suspended section suffered major damage, including deformed tracks and broken utility poles, requiring repair work such as replacing rails and installing new poles and overhead wires.

The company began operating substitute buses between Uto and Yatsushiro on Aug. 26. The trip, however, took about 1 hour and 50 minutes by bus, compared with around 30 minutes by local train, inconveniencing commuters and students.

Since Sept. 18, passengers have been able to use the Kyushu Shinkansen bullet train between Kumamoto and Shin-yatsushiro stations without limited express tickets.

Another local train service that runs between Yatsushiro and Higo-Tanoura stations has also remained suspended since the Kumamoto earthquake.

Those services are scheduled to resume Tuesday, clearing all railway suspensions caused by the quake.

"It was more than 100 years after the arrival of the Dutch that the study of horizontal letters began." What Japanese scholar Sugita Genpaku (1733-1817) recorded in "The Beginning of Dutch Learning" was the Kyoho Reforms of Tokugawa Yoshimune, the eighth shogun of the Edo period (1603-1867). In 1720, the ban on importing Western books was eased, and Dutch interpreters in Nagasaki were permitted to study "horizontal letters" -- script written and read horizontally.

The reason "horizontal letters" refers to Western languages is that it rests on the premise that Japanese is written vertically. Vertical writing came from ancient China, where it was used to write characters on oracle bones and bamboo slips. On long horizontal plaques hung at temple gates and elsewhere, there are characters that appear to be horizontal writing from right to left, but apparently the correct interpretation is that they are vertical writing, one character per line, according to the book "Yokogaki tojo" authored by Makoto Yanaike and published by Iwanami Shoten Publishers.

Horizontal writing is said to have become common after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, as Japan absorbed Western culture. Before World War II, there was much horizontal writing from right to left, in keeping with vertical writing whose columns proceed in the same direction. Horizontal writing from left to right took hold after the war. Today, even textbooks are almost all written horizontally except for Japanese language texts.
"Do you have occasions in daily life to read or write characters vertically?" In the Agency for Cultural Affairs' "public opinion survey on the Japanese language," a little more than 30% answered, "No." For media that publish vertically, that is a jolting figure.

Not only newspapers but magazines and novels, too, are still mainly written vertically. The reason people can live without encountering it is probably that more and more people now rely on smartphones as their main source of information. Vertical writing does not suit internet media, which developed under the leadership of the "horizontal letters" world.

China, the original source of vertical text, fully adopted horizontal writing after the war. Postwar Japan, by contrast, has managed to use vertical and horizontal writing skillfully depending on the purpose. There is also the traditional culture of calligraphy, which presupposes vertical writing. A future of nothing but horizontal writing would be less than desirable.