The exact date when shogi reached Japan is uncertain, but archaeological finds indicate that the game was already being played by the eleventh century during the Heian period.

The history of Tendo Shogi Koma as a local industry dates to the late Edo period.

Historical research by Tendo City indicates that shogi pieces were already being produced within the Oda domain while its administrative center was still in Takahata, before the Oda family moved to Tendo in 1831.

After the move, repeated poor harvests and financial difficulties placed severe pressure on the domain. In the final years of the Edo period, Yoshida Daihachi, a senior official of the Tendo Oda domain, encouraged financially struggling retainers to make shogi pieces as supplementary work. This is regarded as a major turning point in the development of the local industry.

After the Meiji Restoration, former retainers continued to use the woodworking and lacquer-lettering skills they had acquired. Production gradually developed into a specialized division of labor between makers of wooden blanks and artisans who wrote the characters, while wholesalers expanded distribution beyond Yamagata.

From the late Meiji period into the Taisho period, machinery was introduced for preparing wooden blanks, increasing production capacity. During the early Showa period, stamped pieces known as oshi-goma became widespread, helping Tendo develop into a major production center.

After World War II, production of stamped and directly written pieces declined, while carved pieces became more prominent. More refined types, including hori-ume-goma and moriage-goma, were also developed and increasingly produced.

On April 8, 1996, Tendo Shogi Koma were designated as a Traditional Craft by the Japanese government.

Today, artisans continue to produce kaki-goma, hori-goma, hori-ume-goma, and moriage-goma while preserving specialized skills in wood preparation, carving, and lacquer lettering.

1. 1. Rough cutting Specially selected logs are thoroughly dried for a few years to prevent any later cracking or distortion. The log is sliced into rounds at about the thickness of a chess piece. The wood slices are cut roughly along the grain. Among the types of wood, boxwood is considered to be the best, as it has a beautiful grain, moderate hardness, and the strength for years of use. Especially priced and reserved for top quality pieces are Japanese boxtree from Mikurajima Island near Tokyo and the town of Satsuma in Kagoshima prefecture.
2. 2. Cutting A komagirinata or small hatchet is used to shave the wood and cut it into small pieces, then both sides are whittled down to the width of the chess pieces. The underside is flattened, and then the top shaved to make the piece's unique shape. The next process is to cut the wood to make forty chess pieces of the right width with a similar grain picked out and cut into an irregular pentagon shape. Since the beauty of the grain is fairly important, the pieces must be selected with the artisan's attentive eye.
3. 3. Pasting calligraphy, carving Next is a process to paste paper with a written kanji character onto each chess piece. After pasting, the piece is fastened to special table and the characters are engraved with a knife. Highly-skilled engravers use another technique called sukashibori, which is to directly carve wood without pasting any paper. In the lacquering groundwork process, a coat of natural glue or persimmon tannin is applied to the engraved characters. In recent years, this is substituted with a form of glue.
4. 4. Lacquering Chess pieces with engraved characters coated with Japanese lacquer are known as horigoma and are both hand-carved and machine-carved products. Horiumegoma is made by repeatedly painting the engraved characters with rust lacquer and allowing each layer to dry which can take almost a month until the lacquer reaches the level of the wood. In the next process, the surface of the chess pieces is intensively polished. The last step of horiumegoma is polishing the surface with a piece of porcelain.
5. 5. Moriagegoma Moriagegoma is a piece with characters written in raised lacquer. After horiumegoma is complete, each kanji character's surface is raised by adding several layers of Japanese lacquer with a brush. Since it is impossible to apply a thick coat of lacquer at one time, repeated lacquering and drying is required. Moriagegoma is a highly exclusive product, even used in professional chess games. Only the very best artisans can lacquer evenly and three-dimensionally.
6. 6. Kakigoma Then the kanji characters are directly written in black lacquer on a wood surface. Seems simple, but writing with sticky lacquer on such a tiny chess piece requires lots of skill. Master artisans with decades of experience make it look deceptively simple, taking only a few flicks of the brush to produce beautiful and much admired calligraphy in a matter of moments. There are two kinds of characters, a cursive font, which is the most traditional design in Tendo and square font.