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You are absolutely right about this, and I have always been aware of it. If you switch Jocly to the 2D representation for Chu Shogi, you can see that I did use pictogram rather than kanji pieces there. It has always been my plan to 'fork' this implementation of Chu Shogi into one that consistently uses kanji (and that could then have an uncheckered board), and one with a western representation. But that is easier said than done:

For one, it is not entirely clear what that western representation should be: pictograms/statues or mnemonic. For westerners kanji are awful, but for large games pictograms/statues are not much better. People would have to learn to associate moves with unrelated shapes or names, as the pictograms only help memorizing the names. (Like kanji would for people reading Japanese.) For a large game this is a daunting task, for someone only familiar with the 6 orthodox pieces. We might have become unperceptice for this, by slowly familiarizing ourselves with ever larger games, expanding the piece repertoire step by step after those from the smaller games became as natural to us as orthodox pieces.

Yet when I conducted a survey on the TalkChess forum what representation for Chu Shogi they would prefer, most people preferred the pictograms over the mnemonic pieces. In the XBoard implementation of Chu Shogi I tried to use pictograms that at least had some resemblance to the move, like swords pointing in the relevant direction for the Vertical and Side Mover.

Then there is the problem for the 3D pieces. The Jocly tutorial gave a prescription how to create those. But it required software that was no longer available, so I could not do it. I could create simple geometric shapes, such as the shogi tiles, with a text editor, after learning the encoding standard for the Jocly pieces. And it is basically only a single piece that I had to create for that. Only the top surface has to be painted differently, and this was just a matter of selecting a JPG image of wood, and using MS Paint to write various kanji on those from a Japanese character set.

Of course I could also write mnemonic symbols on the shogi tiles, and color them differently, but then the use of tiles would just make the symbols unnecessarily small. Perhaps I should use square tiles or draughts chips, and pain mnemonic symbols on those. It would be a horrendous task to create Staunton-like 3D pieces with a text editor, and I never got any further than distorting existing ones. The existing Jocly 3D pieces are not very suitable, (e.g. what Chu piece would you use an Antelope for?), and I am not even sure there would be enough to represent all types.