If you can find your way to a Bornelund toy store in Japan, you'd better be prepared for some of the highest concentration of top-in-class toys from all over the world. [Or at least from Japan and Europe. In. Sane.]
Right now: Build A Landscape. This great-looking playset is from the Dutch educational materials company Jegro, and according to Bornelund's writeup, it's used regularly in Dutch schools to teach spatial recognition and the use of coordinates.
Frankly, the official Jegro write-up is a little scary; it seems to emphasize the development of copying skills, where you build a landscape to match some blueprint or another. The idea of transferrring from a 2-D representation to a 3-D spatial configuration sounds great, but that stuff's for five year olds. For the first few years, just use these atypically shaped blocks to tell how the bears were sick of cooking, so they went down from the mountains into town for some porridge or something.
Jegro's website says their products are available in the US via eNasco.com, a big catalog site. Good luck finding this thing, though. In Japan, it's 8,400 yen. [bornelund.co.jp, jegro.com]
I love you for the title alone.
Screw the kid... why do I have serious man-love for this toy?