Until the availability of cheap calculators in the 1980s abacuses were commonly seen on shop counters from Moscow to Tokyo. In fact, during the transition between the manual and electronic eras, a product combining both calculator and abacus was sold in Japan. Addition is usually faster on the abacus since you get your answer as soon as you input the numbers. With multiplication the electronic calculator gives you a slight speed advantage.
“Abacus use has dropped in Japan since the 1970s when, at its peak, 3.2 million pupils a year sat the national soroban proficiency exam. Yet the abacus still remains a defining aspect of growing up, a mainstream extra-curricular activity like swimming, violin or judo. Abacus training, in fact, is run like a martial art. Levels of ability are measured in dans, and there is a competitive structure of local, provincial and national competitions. One Sunday I went to see a regional event. Almost 300 children, aged between 5 and 12, sat at desks in a conference hall with an array of special soroban accessories, like sleek abacus bags. An announcer stood at the front of the hall and dictated, with the intonation of an impatient muezzin, numbers to be added, subtracted or multiplied. It was a knock-out competition that lasted several hours. A chorus of military brass-band music was pumped through the sound system when the trophies—each with a winged figure holding an abacus aloft—were presented to the victors.
At Miyamoto’s school he introduced me to one of his best pupils. Naoki Furuyama, aged 19, is a former national soroban champion. He was dressed casually, with a light checked shirt over a black T-shirt, and seemed a relaxed and well-adjusted teenager—certainly not the cliché of a socially awkward übergeek. Furuyama can multiply two six-digit numbers together in about four seconds, which is about as long as it takes to say the problem. I asked him what the point was of being able to calculate so fast, since there is no need for such skills in daily life. He replied that it helped his powers of concentration and self-discipline. Miyamoto was standing with us, and he interrupted. What was the point of running 26 miles, he asked me? There was never any need to run 26 miles, but people did it as a way of pushing human performance to the limit. Likewise, he added, there was a nobility in training one’s arithmetical brain as far as one could.
Some parents send their children to abacus club because it is a way to improve school maths results. But that does not completely explain the abacus’s popularity. Other after-school clubs provide more targeted maths tuition—Kumon, for example, a method of ploughing through worksheets that started in Osaka in the early 1950s, is now followed by more than four million children around the world. Abacus club is fun. I saw that in the faces of the pupils at Miyamoto’s school. They clearly enjoyed their dexterity at flicking the beads with speed and precision. The Japanese heritage of the soroban generates national pride. Yet the real joy of the abacus, I thought, is more primal: it has been used for thousands of years and, in some cases, is still the fastest way to do sums.
