Aya Fujita
Japanese Shogi player
Aya Fujita (藤田 綾, Fujita Aya; born March 24, 1987) is a Japanese women's professional shogi player ranked 2-dan. She holds the record for being the youngest person at age 11 years 6 months to have ever been awarded women's professional status by the Japan Shogi Association.
Early life and apprenticeship
Fujita was born on March 24, 1987, in Ōta, Tokyo. She learned how to play shogi from her father as a young girl, but started to become really serious about the game as a second-grade elementary school student. Her father was fairly strict so she was not allowed to watch much television as a child, with the exception being when her family watched the recorded games from the NHK Cup TV Shogi Tournament together weekly. Most of her shogi studying involved solving tsume shogi problems and playing over professional game scores found in Japan Shogi Association (JSA) yearbooks and magazines, but occasionally she would go to play practice games at the shogi club located in the association's Tokyo head office.
Fujita entered the JSA's Women's Professional Apprentice League as a student of shogi professional Kazuyoshi Nishimura in April 1997 and finished second in the league's Class B division for the April – September 1997 season with a record of 14 wins and 4 losses to earn promotion to the Class A division. Fujita finished her first season in Class A (October 1997 – March 1998) with a record of 7 wins and 9 losses, but obtained women's professional status and promotion to the rank of women's professional 2-kyū after finishing first with a record of 12 wins a 2 losses in the league's Class A division for the April – September 1998 season. Fujita was 11 years 6 months old when she was promoted which made her the youngest person to ever be awarded women's professional status.
Women's shogi professional
Promotion history
Fujita has been promoted as follows:
2-kyū: October 1, 1998
1-kyū: April 1, 2000
1-dan: April 1, 2001
2-dan: August 13, 2016
Note: All ranks are women's professional ranks.
“Aya Fujita” enters the record as japanese Shogi player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fujita, Japanese and Shogi can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11624874. VIAF identifies the subject as 20152561576315441377. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1997, 1998 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aya Fujita” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.