Greater than the sum of its parts

SHIROI, Chiba — Click, click, click. Looking at the vast array of abacuses packed together on the two-story Shiroi Abacus Museum, you can almost hear the sound of the beads. On display are about 1,800 abacuses and other related materials collected by museum director Kenichi Ishido over about two decades.

This is one of several museums around the country dedicated to abacuses, or “soroban” in Japanese, which are everywhere inside and around the museum’s grounds.

About 20 dosojin — guardian deities of travelers — watch over the sidewalks around the museum. As you approach the site, the Seven Gods of Good Fortune gaze down at you from the roof holding abacuses. In the entrance stands a statue of Ninomiya Kinjiro, a leading agricultural philosopher in the late Edo period (1603-1867), holding an abacus instead of a book. Look closely at the museum walls and you’ll see they’re embedded with tiles in the shape of abacus beads.

“I built it so children could enjoy abacuses and become familiar with them,” said Ishido, 69, who is also chairman of Ishido Co., a company based in Shiroi that holds abacus classes inside and outside Chiba Prefecture.

Ishido retired from his job as a company president in 2011 at the age of 62 to build the museum to show people the charms of the abacus. He purchased abacuses from antique shops, online and elsewhere, and put them on display.

The museum has abacuses that were made all over the country, including Kyoto, Banshu in present day Hyogo Prefecture, and Otsu. There is an abacus with units such as “ryo” and “bu” that were used during the Kansei era (1789-1801).

Others have markings indicating the price they were sold for, when they were owned and who made them. A special abacus case containing an abacus and inkstone as well as a 10-drawer abacus cabinet on display have the feel of days gone by.

Some of the museum’s unique items include a 3-meter abacus used at New Year’s “hajiki hajime” events, abacuses used in countries such as Poland and Russia, and combination calculator-abacuses that were marketed by home appliance companies in the 1970s.

The number of abacus users dropped when calculators appeared, but the soroban has been given a second look due to supposed effects such as improving concentration in children.

“I want people to experience the surviving history and culture of the abacus,” Ishido said.

Photos by Taku Yaginuma/Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun Calculator-abacuses, a type sold by home appliance companies in the 1970s

“[Abacuses] were a necessary item in daily life for computations and other tasks, but they can also be used as decorations,” said museum director Kenichi Ishido, left. Daifukucho account books used during the Edo period (1603-1867), right.

A dosojin guardian deity dressed as an Edo-period abacus teacher