![]() Their foreheads damp with sweat, they ran through long pages of multiplication and division, adding columns of figures and finding the square and cube roots of numbers with decimals out to the trillionth place, clicking their soroban beads at astonishing speeds. Kawaguchi worked with the school’s most advanced students, two elementary-age girls who were preparing for the Kyoto competition.įor two and a half hours, he set them on timed drills. Today, aside from teaching, she mainly uses her mental soroban skills to add up grocery bills before she gets to the cashier. She admitted, though, that her soroban prowess did not help much in higher-level math like calculus. Kawaguchi, a two-time national soroban champion who won her first competition when she was 14. “They will be viewed as a smart kid in class, and that will give them confidence,” said Ms. Some educators say the main reason for teaching soroban is to preserve traditional Japanese culture.īut Yukako Kawaguchi, 44, who runs one of the approximately 6,500 private soroban schools nationwide with her husband, Yoshiharu Kawaguchi, 47, said those who study the soroban intensively develop a sense of achievement. Students add, subtract, multiply and divide by sliding the beads up and down. One bead on the top of each column is worth five, while four on the bottom of each column are worth one each. ![]() The soroban is made up of columns of beads, with each column standing for a place value like ones, hundreds, thousands and so on. ![]()
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