THINGS JAPANESE.
Abacus. Learn to count on the abacus—the soroban, as the Japanese call it—and you will often be able to save a large percentage on your purchases. The abacus is that instrument, composed of beads sliding on wires fixed in a frame, with which many of us learnt the multiplication table in early childhood. In Japan it is used, not only by children, but by adults, who still mostly prefer it to our method of figuring with pen and paper. As for mental arithmetic, that does not exist in this archipelago. Tell any ordinary Japanese to add 5 and 7: he will flounder hopelessly, unless his familiar friend, the abacus, is at hand. And here we come round again to the practical advantage of being able to read off at sight a number figured on this instrument. You have been bargaining at a curio-shop, we will suppose. The shopman has got perplexed. He refers to his list, and then calculates on the instrument (which of course he takes for granted that you do not understand) the lowest price for which he can let you have the article in question. Then he raises his head, and, with a bland smile, assures you that the cost of it to himself was so and so, naming a price considerably larger than the real one. You have the better of him, if you can read his figuring of the sum. If you cannot, ten to one he has the better of you.
The principle of the abacus is this:—Each of the five beads in the broad lower division of the board represents one unit, and each solitary bead in the narrow upper division represents five units. Each vertical column is thus worth ten units. Furthermore, each vertical column represents units ten times greater than those in the
