Every day at the Global Indian International School (GIIS) in Tokyo's Edogawa Ward starts with yoga. All the students -- from kindergarteners to 14-year-old ninth-graders -- have a 20-minute session in their classrooms. The focus is on breathing, which it's thought helps them to relax and concentrate better during lessons.
So, it was hardly a surprise to find that in a fourth-grade math class that followed, the 9-year-olds were full of enthusiasm to tackle a new problem -- how to correctly read such a huge figure as 21,439,127 in the Western way of counting numbers.
"Twenty-one million, four-hundred-and-thirty-nine thousand, one hundred and twenty seven," a student slowly recited before the others. "Yes, that's correct. Very good," the teacher responded. They have already learned that the number is described differently in the Hindu-Arabic number-counting system.