The soroban is Japan’s version of the abacus — and it’s making a comeback.

There’s something quietly radical about the soroban making a comeback in 2025. For decades it sat on classroom shelves like a nostalgic relic. It was an object parents remembered, older teachers praised, but kids rarely touched. Yet here we are: enrollment in soroban classes is rising, and instructors across Japan are seeing something unexpected. Children are showing up not because their parents dragged them in, but because they actually want to learn.

Check out this story for details.

It makes sense. I mean, I think it does. Hear me out as I ramble on and maybe you’ll come to agree.

At this point, the digital age is old enough that its cracks are visible. Apps solve problems instantly; calculators spit out answers without context. Kids raised on screens are often fluent in tapping but less fluent in thinking through numbers step by step. And this is exactly where the soroban still shines.

What stands out is how physical the learning is. This is different from punching numbers on a keyboard, but it is also different from writing them out by hand. Soroban practice forces the brain to build a tactile, spatial model of number relationships. After enough repetition, students start using a “mental abacus”, manipulating imaginary beads in their mind. Neurologically, it’s a powerful form of embodied cognition: math not as symbols on paper but as something you can feel.

I know how that souunds. Numbers we can feel… There is quite a lot of madness on Hive lately, and that sounds like it would fit right now. It also has the air of something Euclid or Pythagoras would have said — one of those old guys who worshipped numbers and saw them as divine.

But you can see it in action in people who learned math using a soroban. Give them a problem and you can watch their fingers twitch, shuffling the mental beads back and forth as they work out the solution. It’s something to see.

Kids trained on the soroban frequently calculate faster than students using standard written methods. More importantly, they understand what they’re doing. Place value becomes a moving system, not a rule set. Borrowing and carrying aren’t arbitrary steps; they’re transformations that can be visualized. I’ve read about this and seen it in action enough to believe it.

Digital tools skip all that. Press the wrong button and you get a wrong answer with no trail of reasoning. The soroban, by contrast, demands attention. It forces you to push each bead consciously, step by step. You can’t zone out. You can’t let the device think for you. You are forced to understand.

Maybe that’s why it’s returning. Parents aren’t rejecting technology; they’re compensating for it. Let’s put that another way: The soroban isn’t nostalgia; it’s something more like a correction.

I’ve played around with it myself, but it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, especially with the little free time adulthood provides. Looking back, I would have loved to have been forced to learn this more physical method when I was in school.[1] I’ve gently nudged my kids toward it, but they both hate math and we don’t have the money for extra classes anyway. Oh well.

If you’re curious and want to play with the idea yourself, buy an abacus off Amazon. Any will do, but here’s a soroban on Amazon US. Maybe you, too, can join in.

I know I know, I would have hated it was a kid. Then again, maybe not. I always was good at math and liked it. I might have seen the beauty in the soroban and embraced it. ↩

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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky.

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