Flying fingers delivering digits
The caller read out the numbers at a speed evoking an auctioneer on fast-forward, each multi-digit figure blurring into the next.
Within seconds, Daiki Kamino’s right arm shot up in the air, triumphant. Not only had he heard every number, but he also had tabulated them and arrived at the correct, 16-digit sum: 8,186,699,633,530,061. He did it all on an abacus. For this bit of mathematical virtuosity, Daiki, 16, a high school student from Hiroshima, was crowned champion in the dictation event at an annual tournament in Kyoto, where competitors pull off dazzling arithmetic feats simply by sliding tiny beads along rods set within modest wood frames.
Daiki is rangy and slightly awkward in that teenage boy kind of way. For the last eight years, he’s spent up to three hours a day practising on the abacus, or “soroban” in Japanese.
“There are times when I’m not in the mood,” he said. “But I start enjoying it once I start getting the right answers.
“I listen and move my fingers and repeat the numbers in my head,” he added, trying to explain how he could possibly do what he does. “As soon as I hear the unit like trillion or billion, I start to move my fingers.”
About 43,000 students take advanced soroban lessons at private schools in Japan, according to government estimates, although soroban associations say the number is higher. Many practitioners sit for exams to attain advanced qualifications known as kyu or dan, which are akin to belts in martial arts. Those who excel compete in national tournaments.
Showing the discipline of elite athletes, more than 800 contestants from across Japan, and a few from South Korea, gathered in an auditorium in Kyoto this month to put their skills to the test.
The youngest competitor was 8, the oldest 69. Multiplying and dividing numbers with as many as16 digits, they sent rapid clickety-clacks rippling across the room like a summer downpour.
For some events, the contestants dispensed with the physical soroban and mentally pictured the beads as they completed long pages of calculations.
One winner, a 20-year-old college student, broke his own Guinness World Record by adding in his head 15 three-digit numbers that flashed on a large screen at the front of the auditorium — all in 1.64 seconds.
In the late 1970s, education officials, eager to bolster the population’s scientific and technological skills, significantly cut back on soroban instruction.
Today, textbooks mandated by the education ministry include only a couple of pages on the soroban. Students receive basic lessons for just two hours a year in third and fourth grade.
But advocates for soroban instruction are pushing the ministry to introduce the old-school devices earlier.
“For little kids, it’s so easy to visualize numbers on the soroban,” said Yasuo Okahisa, deputy director of the League for Soroban Education in Japan.