The joy of Japanese puzzles

Ever since I first visited Japan a decade ago, I have been fascinated by its approach to maths. The Japanese are, on the whole, more comfortable with numbers that we are in the West. Their elevated numeracy is a result of many idiosyncratic factors. Children, for example, are taught their times tables as a nursery rhyme, which seems to have the effect of lodging the numbers more deeply in the brain. Also, about a million Japanese attend after-school clubs to learn to use the abacus.

Another element of Japan’s numerate society is a unique culture of logic puzzles. Japanese logic puzzles — that is, pencil-and-paper puzzles with Japanese names based on grids that you need to fill in — are now known all over the world. Sudoku is the most famous, but open your daily newspaper and you will find others, like Kakuro and KenKen. Even though some of them are not originally from Japan (Sudoku was devised by an American, who called it Number Place), they were all refined by Japanese puzzle masters and became popular thanks to the Japanese market.