1. Jinkoki

The Jinkoki was the most popular arithmetic book in the days when the computational technique using the soroban took root in Japan; we exhibit two copies of it that were owned by the National Diet Library.

1 Shinpen Jinkoki
By Yoshida Mitsuyoshi. n.d. 1 v. <104-180>

This is a three-volume book, consisting of jo (first), chu (second), and ge (third) volumes. Information on the year of publication and the name of the publisher are not provided.

The editor Yoshida Mitsuyoshi (1598-1673) published Jinkoki, or an operational manual for soroban, with the book undergoing many revisions in his lifetime. The version published in the eleventh year of the Kan'ei era (1641) became the most widespread, and the last version Yoshida himself published was the Idai book, in the eighteenth year of the Kan'ei era (1634). After that, various versions of the book were published, and the Shinpen Jinkoki introduced here is one of them. Its content is close to the one of the Kan'ei 11 versions.

The first volume mainly describes multiplications and divisions using the soroban, while the second and third volumes include an assortment of practical and recreational problems. The included problems are not arranged according to any specific order. The book includes ideas that keep readers from boredom by adopting a wide variety of problems such as calculations of areas of rice fields, problems related to the construction of rivers and banks, geometric progression, and the Josephus problem. This Shinpen Jinkoki was the most widespread version among the copies of Jinkoki widely used as a textbook for soroban throughout the Edo period.

2 Shinpen Jinkoki
By Yoshida Mitsuyoshi. 1689. 1 v. <166-133>

Please refer to Shinpen Jinkoki in the previous section. This book has imprint: "Genroku 2" (1689) at the back.We can read "Shinpan Jinkoki" in the preface at the beginning and "Zoho Jinkoki" in the center of the pages. We can also find an additions on the upper section of the main text.

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