Being in India after such a long time, made me feel like Urashima Taro. My own hometown has changed beyond recognition so I have been learning new things about my own country every day. The following was written in response to a Japanese person’s question regarding the future of India Japan relationship and how it could develop further. I have highlighted some areas where India is lacking, some of which Japan could help India by investing in such key areas and in the process build a firm foundation for a new kind of Indo-Japan relationship in the 21st century. Things are happening, like the bilateral currency accord for $ 3 billion etc. along with some amount of outsourcing and investment, but still we can call them precious little.
1. Soft power: In Japan, the largest numbers of foreign students are from China and Korea. Indians are a minority. In the US of A the largest number of foreign students are from India, (second is China and third is South Korea), a lot of whom have settled down there in the past, making Indians one of the largest diaspora in the US. They have become top class scientists, politicians and administrators too in the course of time. Settling down in Japan is hard. There are very few Indians who have spent their entire lives in Japan and even fewer Japanese who have done the same in India. This factor is going to determine future relations between the two countries in the long run both economically and politically. Japanese soft power, mainly stemming from manga, anime and funky culture has not had much of an effect on India. Not that we need such soft power! As Professor Roger Pulvers has pointed out on a YouTube video, Japan needs to convert soft power into smart power as soft power does not necessarily show an interest in Japan.
2. The IT boom and mathematics: Here are a few straight facts. Only 0.1 percent of the Indian population is engaged in the IT industry. (This sector alone can not sustain the entire country in any way.) This industry is the biggest boom in India now. Bulk of the work comes from the US, a result of outsourcing, often called back office work! This boom is the result of the university education in India for the past sixty years. Everyone is encouraged to become an engineer. Anyone who is not an engineer is frowned upon. All these techies have joined the Information Technology sector and have made it “big”. How big is open to debate. There has not been any invention from this “shining” sector that has affected the world in any significant way. For example, the innovative way Google, Apple Computers, Facebook etc. have. And if you talk of money, well these companies are still far behind their Western counterparts, their R&D expenditure too low to be of any significance. Also, this has nothing to do with being good at math. Being able to do multiplication tables fast is not the big point. Not many students learn upto 20 X 20 as most Japanese would like to believe. (I don’t think it is a big deal to learn multiplication tables by heart. The Japanese who master about 2000 characters in their script could easily do so if they wanted. And no one talks about how many multiplication tables Einstein could recite do they?!). Also, Japanese people should not forget that Japanese students perform far better in the Mathematics Olympiad than their Indian counterparts. If you still have doubts, catch hold of an Indian at random and ask her/ him to perform mental math.
Those people who are engineers but did not find the opportunity to go to the US by a whisker, have a solid foundation of mathematics due to their engineering background. That is how the IT grew. And when money started flowing in, a lot of Indians in the US started to come back to India because they could get well paid jobs here too. But these days even high school pass outs with diplomas are calling themselves engineers!
Indian companies also bought a bulk of the fibre optic cables from US companies when they over invested themselves out of business. So communications with the US became virtually free. Phone calls to Japan are still very expensive and so are sending goods by post.
3. Many people often compare India-US and India-Japan relationships. They should realize that they have been respectively many more differences than similarities and that the numbers involved are vastly different. For example, in the 60’s about 25,000 Indians settled in the US. They were the cream of Indian brain power and some of them have achieved gigantic feats. In recent times, about 20,000 Indians are living in Japan. But it is unfair to compare them with those Indians who settled in the US in those times. None of them have even come near their feats of excellence. Also, they are not the best Indian brains for the best still go to the UK and US.
4. 68% of Indian software exports are dependent on the US. Japan is still a puny player in India. Wonder why!
5. The current scenario of business is only about cost cutting. Japan does not seem too confident or interested in India’s “brain power” yet.
6. As Suvro Sir pointed out, “I think the Japanese are cautious, but they keep informed. When they feel India is ready, they will come to invest willingly enough. Yelling at them is not likely to make them act quicker!” Unless more and more Japanese people come and work with their Indian counterparts and understand the office politics and regional biases that prevail, only investing money is not going to get the desired results.
7. Mobile phones: In 2004, 70 percent of the people in the world had never heard a dial tone i.e. they had never used a telephone. Just six years back mobile phones were a rare luxury in India that few people could afford. In 2008, there were 10.89 million new users for mobile phones in India. Now everyone has a mobile phone including students and domestic helpers. Mobile phones are much cheaper than landlines. A huge market for mobile phone companies. A few years back Japanese mobile phones did not connect in India. Now you can use any Japanese mobile phone, AU, Softbank, Docomo in most cities in India. Just switch it on and call! But due to radiation from mobile phones the sparrows can not be seen anymore. Docomo has a joint venture with TATA.
8. 200 million people (may be many more!) in India live below the poverty line. How to solve that problem is the biggest challenge. How can Japan help? How many Japanese volunteers and teachers do we find here when compared to those going to Africa or south-east Asia or Latin America?
9. Clean drinking water is scarce in India. Another big challenge of the future. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges! An area where Japanese technology can be of immense help. We Indians have forgotten that in ancient times India had a good water system. Some Japanese are doing research on that. Perhaps they have something to teach us in a new/ modern way?
10. National highways are clean and fast. With high speed Volvo buses running between cities, transportation has become faster and more comfortable. This will help commerce and business. Also, Japanese technology can help find culprits of rash driving and make life better. Traffic accidents are on the rise in India and should already be sufficient cause for worry.
11. India is one of the very few developing nations that have avoided famine. Despite troubled politics and ignorant voters, India has maintained her democratic system without much problem. This is something to think about. But of late, rise in onion prices and food scarcity is alarming. We lack proper storage facilities and modern farming methods. More and more farmers are moving to cities to find jobs as farming is no longer a viable livelihood as rising suicide rates partially indicate.
12. There are only 15 million tax payers in a country (India) that has a population of 1.13 billion people. The rich evade taxes and the poor just can not pay; two extremes of the problem; there must be many more reasons. Contrary to popular belief, tax rates are very high in India. Prices of commodities have risen in recent times but not in proportion to the rise in incomes, thus creating disparity.
13. Medicine: There is no national health insurance scheme in India. Medical expenses are so high that people avoid going to doctors or hospitals or rely on free medical help from friends and relatives who are doctors. Any major surgery is beyond the reach of most people. Public hospitals are insanely dirty. An MRI scan is much more expensive in India than in Japan when an individual goes without insurance coverage (insurance is compulsory in Japan) but there is no surety of getting good results because the machines are often old and over used.
14. Solar power: India has abundant sunshine throughout the country. Solar power could be the next best alternative to electricity not just in remote villages but cities as well. Japanese solar panels are good. Could they be installed in bulk?
Given the above points it leaves Japan ample opportunity to develop strategic technological and insurance/ investment ties with India. Simply being the largest recipient of the Japanese ODA is not enough. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that being the largest recepient of US aid after independence did not bring any significant improvement in India. As a top class economist and former US ambassador to India, he should have known best.
Relationship between India and Japan has at best been at a cursory level so far. But there is a lot of scope to forge deeper ties of friendship as business partners in the 21st century. Suzuki is the largest selling car in India. But they could soon be overtaken by TATA, Hyundai etc. Japan could provide technological help and create their own market for cheap high quality products in India in medicine, water purifiers, solar power, high speed transport, and telecommunications. 3G mobile phones with Japanese technology could be a hit. Also, management science is a much sought after qualification in recent times. Japan could make business schools that taught and offered diplomas and degrees in Japanese Management. Doing this will also increase the demand for knowing the Japanese language.
These technological ties and investment in cheap high quality medical products will achieve much more than ODA. In modern times giving financial aid to other countries is a type of diplomacy and not out of necessity on either the part of the giver or that of the recipient. Although both India and China receive huge amounts of financial aid from Japan, both India and China give a lot of financial aid to other countries. This is true with many other countries.
Economists and some journalists predicted the economic crisis a decade ago. The party had gone on too long in some countries. In present times with a world that is increasingly becoming flat economically, the financial aid diplomacy is just not enough to forge lasting ties.
Similarly, just trying to balance China politically is not going to bring any long term fruitful results.
India Japan relationship does not have much common cultural background. Talking of Buddhism coming to Japan from India is not going to build stronger ties in the modern world. Technological partnership and more collaborative work will be the most beneficial for both sides. Repeating myself, Japan could help India build plants that would process clean water and could also use the sea water available to India on all sides by building distilleries. We would not have to depend so much on the polluted Ganges then.
P.S. LIC India and Nomura securities Japan have recently joined hands in India.
(mostly written in the latter half of 2009)
Showing posts with label India Japan relationship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India Japan relationship. Show all posts
Monday, February 14, 2011
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Vivekananda On Japan And India
Oriental Hotel
Yokohama
10th July 1893.
...
From Canton I returned to Hong Kong and from thence to Japan. The first port we touched was Nagasaki. We landed for a few hours and drove through the town. What a contrast! The Japanese are one of the cleanliest peoples on earth. Everything is neat and tidy. Their streets are nearly all broad, straight and regularly paved. Their little houses are cage-like, and their pine-covered evergreen little hills form the background of almost every town and village. The short-statured, fair-skinned, quaintly-dressed Japanese, their movements, attitudes, gestures, everything is picturesque. Japan is the land of the picturesque! Almost every house has a garden at the back, very nicely laid out according to Japanese fashion with small shrubs, grass-plots, small artificial waters, and small stone bridges.
From Nagasaki to Kobe. Here I gave up the steamer and took the land route to Yokohama, with a view to see the interior of Japan.
I have seen three big cities in the interior – Osaka, a great manufacturing town, Kyoto, the former capital, and Tokyo, the present capital. Tokyo is nearly twice the size of Calcutta with nearly double the population.
No foreigner is allowed to travel in the interior without a passport.
The Japanese seem now to have fully awakened themselves to the necessity of the present times. They have now a thoroughly organized army equipped with guns which one of their own officers has invented and which is said to be second to none. Then, they are continually increasing their navy. I have seen a tunnel nearly a mile long, bored by a Japanese engineer.
The match factories are simply a sight to see, and they are bent upon making everything they want they want in their own country. There is a Japanese line of streamers plying between China and Japan, which shortly intends running between Bombay and Yokohama.
I saw quite a lot of temples. In every temple there are some Sanskrit mantras written in Old Bengali characters. Only a few of the priests know Sanskrit. But they are an intelligent sect. The modern rage for progress has penetrated even the priesthood. I cannot write what I have in my mind about the Japanese in one short letter. Only I want that numbers of our young men should pay a visit to Japan and China every year. Especially to the Japanese, India is still the dreamland of everything high and good. And you, what are you? … talking twaddle all your lives, vain talkers, what are you? Come, see these people, and then go and hide your faces in shame. A race of dotards, you lose your caste if you come out! Sitting down these hundreds of years with an ever-increasing load of crystallized superstition on your heads, for hundreds of years spending all your energy upon discussing the touchableness of untouchableness of this food or that, with all humanity crushed out of you by the continuous social tyranny of ages – what are you? And what are you doing now? … promenading the sea-shores with books in your hands – repeating undigested stray bits of European brainwork, and the whole soul bent upon getting a thirty rupee clerkship, or at best becoming a lawyer – the height of young India’s ambition – and every student with a whole brood of hungry children cackling at his heels and asking for bread! Is there not water enough in the sea to drown you, books, gowns, university diplomas, and all?
Come, be men! Kick out the priests who are always against progress, because they would never mend, their hearts would never become big. They are the offspring of centuries of superstition and tyranny. Root out priest craft first. Come, be men! Come out of your narrow holes and have a look abroad. See how nations are on the march! Do you love man? Do you love your country? Then come, let us struggle for higher and better things; look not back, no, not even if you see the dearest and nearest cry. Look not back, but forward!
...
Yours etc.,
VIVEKANANDA
PS: Calm and silent and steady work, and no newspaper humbug, no name-making, you must always remember.
※p. 246 ～248. “The Penguin Swami Vivekananda Reader,” edited by Makarand Paranjape.
Vivekananda has used the word “Japs” in two places. I have replaced it with “Japanese” since it has an offensive connotation as well.
This letter starts with Vivekananda’s description of China from where he went to Japan.
The letter ends with Vivekananda rebuking Indians and calling on his countrymen to build a great nation.
The following interview appeared in The Hindu on February 6, 1897. As the compiler of the book has aptly remarked, Vivekananda’s words, as reported by others, may not be as reliable a measure of his views as his own writings might be. But the reader does have the privilege to judge whether they are in sync with his thoughts by reading his own works with great care.
1. What did you see in Japan, and is there any chance of India following in the progressive steps of Japan?
Vivekananda: “None whatever, until all the three hundred millions of India combine together as a whole nation. The world has never seen such a patriotic and artistic race as the Japanese, and one special feature about them is this that while in Europe and elsewhere art generally goes to dirt, Japanese art is art plus absolute cleanliness. I would wish that every one of our young men could visit Japan once at least in his lifetime. It is very easy to go there. The Japanese think that everything Hindu is great and believe that India is a holy land. Japanese Buddhism is entirely different from what you see in Ceylon. It is the same as Vedanta. It is positive and theistic Buddhism, not the atheistic Buddhism of Ceylon.”
2. What is the key to Japan’s sudden greatness?
Vivekananda: “The faith of the Japanese in themselves, and their love for their country. When you have men who are ready to sacrifice their everything for their country, sincere to the backbone – when such men arise, India will become great in every respect. It is the men that make the country! What is there in the country? If you catch the social morality and the political morality of the Japanese, you will be as great as they are. The Japanese are ready to sacrifice everything for their country, and they have become a great people. But you are not; you sacrifice everything only for your own families and possessions.”
...
Not much seems to have changed, except that it is very expensive to go to Japan and, more so, stay there. I thank my lucky stars that I got a chance to study in this country that Vivekananda has described in such glowing terms.
※India is currently the largest recepient of the Japanese Official Development Assistance (financial aid).
Yokohama
10th July 1893.
...
From Canton I returned to Hong Kong and from thence to Japan. The first port we touched was Nagasaki. We landed for a few hours and drove through the town. What a contrast! The Japanese are one of the cleanliest peoples on earth. Everything is neat and tidy. Their streets are nearly all broad, straight and regularly paved. Their little houses are cage-like, and their pine-covered evergreen little hills form the background of almost every town and village. The short-statured, fair-skinned, quaintly-dressed Japanese, their movements, attitudes, gestures, everything is picturesque. Japan is the land of the picturesque! Almost every house has a garden at the back, very nicely laid out according to Japanese fashion with small shrubs, grass-plots, small artificial waters, and small stone bridges.
From Nagasaki to Kobe. Here I gave up the steamer and took the land route to Yokohama, with a view to see the interior of Japan.
I have seen three big cities in the interior – Osaka, a great manufacturing town, Kyoto, the former capital, and Tokyo, the present capital. Tokyo is nearly twice the size of Calcutta with nearly double the population.
No foreigner is allowed to travel in the interior without a passport.
The Japanese seem now to have fully awakened themselves to the necessity of the present times. They have now a thoroughly organized army equipped with guns which one of their own officers has invented and which is said to be second to none. Then, they are continually increasing their navy. I have seen a tunnel nearly a mile long, bored by a Japanese engineer.
The match factories are simply a sight to see, and they are bent upon making everything they want they want in their own country. There is a Japanese line of streamers plying between China and Japan, which shortly intends running between Bombay and Yokohama.
I saw quite a lot of temples. In every temple there are some Sanskrit mantras written in Old Bengali characters. Only a few of the priests know Sanskrit. But they are an intelligent sect. The modern rage for progress has penetrated even the priesthood. I cannot write what I have in my mind about the Japanese in one short letter. Only I want that numbers of our young men should pay a visit to Japan and China every year. Especially to the Japanese, India is still the dreamland of everything high and good. And you, what are you? … talking twaddle all your lives, vain talkers, what are you? Come, see these people, and then go and hide your faces in shame. A race of dotards, you lose your caste if you come out! Sitting down these hundreds of years with an ever-increasing load of crystallized superstition on your heads, for hundreds of years spending all your energy upon discussing the touchableness of untouchableness of this food or that, with all humanity crushed out of you by the continuous social tyranny of ages – what are you? And what are you doing now? … promenading the sea-shores with books in your hands – repeating undigested stray bits of European brainwork, and the whole soul bent upon getting a thirty rupee clerkship, or at best becoming a lawyer – the height of young India’s ambition – and every student with a whole brood of hungry children cackling at his heels and asking for bread! Is there not water enough in the sea to drown you, books, gowns, university diplomas, and all?
Come, be men! Kick out the priests who are always against progress, because they would never mend, their hearts would never become big. They are the offspring of centuries of superstition and tyranny. Root out priest craft first. Come, be men! Come out of your narrow holes and have a look abroad. See how nations are on the march! Do you love man? Do you love your country? Then come, let us struggle for higher and better things; look not back, no, not even if you see the dearest and nearest cry. Look not back, but forward!
...
Yours etc.,
VIVEKANANDA
PS: Calm and silent and steady work, and no newspaper humbug, no name-making, you must always remember.
※p. 246 ～248. “The Penguin Swami Vivekananda Reader,” edited by Makarand Paranjape.
Vivekananda has used the word “Japs” in two places. I have replaced it with “Japanese” since it has an offensive connotation as well.
This letter starts with Vivekananda’s description of China from where he went to Japan.
The letter ends with Vivekananda rebuking Indians and calling on his countrymen to build a great nation.
The following interview appeared in The Hindu on February 6, 1897. As the compiler of the book has aptly remarked, Vivekananda’s words, as reported by others, may not be as reliable a measure of his views as his own writings might be. But the reader does have the privilege to judge whether they are in sync with his thoughts by reading his own works with great care.
1. What did you see in Japan, and is there any chance of India following in the progressive steps of Japan?
Vivekananda: “None whatever, until all the three hundred millions of India combine together as a whole nation. The world has never seen such a patriotic and artistic race as the Japanese, and one special feature about them is this that while in Europe and elsewhere art generally goes to dirt, Japanese art is art plus absolute cleanliness. I would wish that every one of our young men could visit Japan once at least in his lifetime. It is very easy to go there. The Japanese think that everything Hindu is great and believe that India is a holy land. Japanese Buddhism is entirely different from what you see in Ceylon. It is the same as Vedanta. It is positive and theistic Buddhism, not the atheistic Buddhism of Ceylon.”
2. What is the key to Japan’s sudden greatness?
Vivekananda: “The faith of the Japanese in themselves, and their love for their country. When you have men who are ready to sacrifice their everything for their country, sincere to the backbone – when such men arise, India will become great in every respect. It is the men that make the country! What is there in the country? If you catch the social morality and the political morality of the Japanese, you will be as great as they are. The Japanese are ready to sacrifice everything for their country, and they have become a great people. But you are not; you sacrifice everything only for your own families and possessions.”
...
Not much seems to have changed, except that it is very expensive to go to Japan and, more so, stay there. I thank my lucky stars that I got a chance to study in this country that Vivekananda has described in such glowing terms.
※India is currently the largest recepient of the Japanese Official Development Assistance (financial aid).
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Part-I, Make the Twain Meet
Indo-Japan relations is not a new topic. Relationship between these two countries started long long ago and the Japanese knew about the existence of India as “Tenjiku” ever since Buddhism was imported into Japan through China and Korea. I would not like to go into such stale details that can be found in almost all history books relating to India and Japan. Though a die-hard optimist, in my opinion, Indo-Japan relationship still has to go a long way in order to really establish permanent ties between the people of these two nations. It is the people of the country who make a nation and ties between two nations means ties between the people of those two nations, culturally and otherwise, so much so that there is great, if not complete, understanding and affability coupled with a sense of attachment towards each other. The plain truth is that knowledge about each other’s country exists only in very limited circles in both India and Japan.
In India, the average educated population knows about Japan as the country of electronic goods in recent times. Fifty years back, this image was a bit different. Stories from my grandfather and people of his age reveal that the Japan they knew in those times was a country that made extremely cheap and highly unreliable products. My granddad had been presented with a Japanese bicycle by his father. The two wheeled contraption cost his father twenty rupees and within a week the front wheel of the bicycle came off beyond repair! Needless to say, he had to be covered in bandages for the rest of the week after the incident. At present, the image is just the opposite and Japanese electronic goods are the most reliable products in the market. Almost every middle class family in India is familiar with SONY. SONY, Sumo, Sayonara, along with Honda, Toyota etc. are part of the limited vocabulary about Japan. And, of course, many people have heard about Mt. Fuji ‘Yama’. There does not seem much interest either in finding out about Japan because information is difficult to obtain and not much is shown on television. People still have ideas that the Japanese are some ‘strange’ race and may actually be eating insects and cockroaches for lunch and dinner! Now there is nothing wrong in eating insects. In fact, I heard that fried grasshoppers are a delicacy in some country. But here in India we do tend to look upon insect eating humans as some sort of ‘loony alien’. On the lighter side, like many people around the world, we eat prawns though, which are biologically classified as insects.
How does an average Japanese lead his life? This is a basic question that most Indians will fail to answer. They can hardly differentiate between a Korean, a Chinese and a Japanese, especially as looks or language is concerned. I remember a person in our neighborhood who brought in something written in Korean and asked me to read it after knowing that I was learning Japanese! He insisted that there must be some similarity when I told him I could not read it.
But little efforts can can really make the common man interested in an apparently queer land and its people. Oshin was a serial shown on the Indian national television some years ago over quite a long period of time. It was a popular serial and I have actually seen people glued to the television, crying and laughing when Oshin did in the serial. People had been held spellbound by the story of a Japanese girl. “Love in Tokyo” was a Hindi film which made the common masses in India realize about the existence of Japan. Is it too expensive for the governments of both countries to air more such programs? This is the best way in today’s age by which people of one country can learn about another.
Now about the Japanese and their knowledge about India. The Japanese will tell you that all Indians look alike! The situation is no better than that here. Ask any Japanese about his/ her image about India and the only words that seem to pop out instantly are ‘kare-‘ and ‘ushi’, the former meaning spicy curry of the Indian subcontinent and the latter cows that can be found everywhere in India, even on highways causing massive traffic jams. I have seen a few Japanese magazines that have portrayed India, and most of the photographs in them were of cows on streets, spiced food, pictures of a few dilapidated houses and tribal people living in utter penury. That is definitely a part of real India, but surely that is not what the whole of India is! Cows and curry can hardly account as major areas of a country’s image. I can understand the surprise and shock the Japanese experience in India. Cows on roads for one thing is unthinkable in Japan. I would like to remind about the deer in Nara prefecture that roam freely. The case is similar.
Having had the good fortune of actually being in Japan for a very short time, we had been taken to an elementary school to experience first hand how and what the children of Japan study in school. It was quite interesting to note that the students had music as well as swimming lessons as part of their curriculum. The Indian education experts should take a cue from this. There was an hour’s session reserved for students there to ask questions about our country. The following are some of the questions the Japanese children asked us:
1. Indo ni ha spoon ga arimasu ka? i.e. Do you have spoons in your country? (They thought that we eat with our hands so have never seen or used spoons).
2. Spoon de taberaremasu ka? – Can you use a spoon?
3. Ie ni sunde imasu ka? Sono ie ni ha yane ga arimasu ka? – Do you stay in a house? And when I said yes I do, they asked me whether that house had a roof or not.
4. Indo de ha michi de tora to hebi ga dete kurun desu ka? – Do snakes and tigers suddenly come out on Indian roads?
There are many such strange questions which I took to be mere childish imagination or ignorance at first, but later realized it to be actually lack of proper sources of knowledge about India. Celebrating fifty years of Indo-Japan relations after the world war, seems to be only a diplomatic exercise at the ministerial level. Nothing concrete is being done to introduce the common people of the two countries to each others culture and ways of living. Staging of a Hindi masala movie (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, titled Mimora in Japanese) in the Japanese Diet is definitely not the only way to celebrate such an important landmark. In India too, people are not much aware of Japanese books and films. Only people who are studying Japanese or are related to Japan in some way or the other, have some knowledge about the country.
My own host family in Japan has a few books in Japanese about India. It is books such as these that give superficial, wrong and insufficient knowledge about India to the average Japanese reader who take even a little bit of interest in India. Misinformation is even worse than knowing nothing at all. I think celebrating of fifty years of our relationship should be in the form of India week being arranged in Japan and Japan week being arranged in India, with a troupe of cultural performers going across different parts of the country and educating the audience through competent interpreters.
The Hindi department of a university in Osaka, Japan, has published a book of Japanese songs translated into Hindi. But sadly, the only audiences for these translated songs are a few Japanese students of Hindi, and a few students like us who are studying the Japanese language. The governments of the two countries should make it a point to broadcast the recent best of Japanese and Indian films/ television serials, with subtitles if required, on the national network of television programs at least over a year long period. These are little efforts which may actually be a great deal.
The youth of almost ever country in the world are being affected by funky hip-hop MTV culture that is ceaselessly being broadcast over television networks. Part of the blame lies with the media that is trying to project this as the on culture that is hip. Apart from the fact that this is not just what America is about, an over abundance of a certain type of program or propaganda means that the youth are being deprived of knowing about other cultures. That is because there is so little to choose from. This is as true for Japan as it is for India. Give the youth a variety of cultures to choose from and see what happens. There will be plenty of choice about what to ape.
The issue is simple. Forget the gimmicks of flowery language, terming something as fifty years of etc. etc. We must decide whether we really want to spread awareness and influence of Japanese and Indian culture in each other’s country or just limit it to only a handful of people who are doing some sort of work related to these two countries.
Notes:
1. This essay was published in Sangam on the occasion of fifty years of Indo-Japan relationship (2002).
2. This was written before I had the opportunity to stay in Japan for a long time. Much remains the same but things are changing. With the internet, there is more information available, though much of it may not be so reliable.
3. Like many foreigners still imagine, on his first visit to Japan, one of my seniors thought that the Japanese people still move about in Kimonos daily. He was in for a shock when he landed in Tokyo and found people in Bermudas and mini-skirts!
4. Historically and culturally speaking, the relationship between India and Japan has been superficial at best. There are many reasons for this. This will be dealt with later. A sequel to this article follows soon. Look out for part-II.
In India, the average educated population knows about Japan as the country of electronic goods in recent times. Fifty years back, this image was a bit different. Stories from my grandfather and people of his age reveal that the Japan they knew in those times was a country that made extremely cheap and highly unreliable products. My granddad had been presented with a Japanese bicycle by his father. The two wheeled contraption cost his father twenty rupees and within a week the front wheel of the bicycle came off beyond repair! Needless to say, he had to be covered in bandages for the rest of the week after the incident. At present, the image is just the opposite and Japanese electronic goods are the most reliable products in the market. Almost every middle class family in India is familiar with SONY. SONY, Sumo, Sayonara, along with Honda, Toyota etc. are part of the limited vocabulary about Japan. And, of course, many people have heard about Mt. Fuji ‘Yama’. There does not seem much interest either in finding out about Japan because information is difficult to obtain and not much is shown on television. People still have ideas that the Japanese are some ‘strange’ race and may actually be eating insects and cockroaches for lunch and dinner! Now there is nothing wrong in eating insects. In fact, I heard that fried grasshoppers are a delicacy in some country. But here in India we do tend to look upon insect eating humans as some sort of ‘loony alien’. On the lighter side, like many people around the world, we eat prawns though, which are biologically classified as insects.
How does an average Japanese lead his life? This is a basic question that most Indians will fail to answer. They can hardly differentiate between a Korean, a Chinese and a Japanese, especially as looks or language is concerned. I remember a person in our neighborhood who brought in something written in Korean and asked me to read it after knowing that I was learning Japanese! He insisted that there must be some similarity when I told him I could not read it.
But little efforts can can really make the common man interested in an apparently queer land and its people. Oshin was a serial shown on the Indian national television some years ago over quite a long period of time. It was a popular serial and I have actually seen people glued to the television, crying and laughing when Oshin did in the serial. People had been held spellbound by the story of a Japanese girl. “Love in Tokyo” was a Hindi film which made the common masses in India realize about the existence of Japan. Is it too expensive for the governments of both countries to air more such programs? This is the best way in today’s age by which people of one country can learn about another.
Now about the Japanese and their knowledge about India. The Japanese will tell you that all Indians look alike! The situation is no better than that here. Ask any Japanese about his/ her image about India and the only words that seem to pop out instantly are ‘kare-‘ and ‘ushi’, the former meaning spicy curry of the Indian subcontinent and the latter cows that can be found everywhere in India, even on highways causing massive traffic jams. I have seen a few Japanese magazines that have portrayed India, and most of the photographs in them were of cows on streets, spiced food, pictures of a few dilapidated houses and tribal people living in utter penury. That is definitely a part of real India, but surely that is not what the whole of India is! Cows and curry can hardly account as major areas of a country’s image. I can understand the surprise and shock the Japanese experience in India. Cows on roads for one thing is unthinkable in Japan. I would like to remind about the deer in Nara prefecture that roam freely. The case is similar.
Having had the good fortune of actually being in Japan for a very short time, we had been taken to an elementary school to experience first hand how and what the children of Japan study in school. It was quite interesting to note that the students had music as well as swimming lessons as part of their curriculum. The Indian education experts should take a cue from this. There was an hour’s session reserved for students there to ask questions about our country. The following are some of the questions the Japanese children asked us:
1. Indo ni ha spoon ga arimasu ka? i.e. Do you have spoons in your country? (They thought that we eat with our hands so have never seen or used spoons).
2. Spoon de taberaremasu ka? – Can you use a spoon?
3. Ie ni sunde imasu ka? Sono ie ni ha yane ga arimasu ka? – Do you stay in a house? And when I said yes I do, they asked me whether that house had a roof or not.
4. Indo de ha michi de tora to hebi ga dete kurun desu ka? – Do snakes and tigers suddenly come out on Indian roads?
There are many such strange questions which I took to be mere childish imagination or ignorance at first, but later realized it to be actually lack of proper sources of knowledge about India. Celebrating fifty years of Indo-Japan relations after the world war, seems to be only a diplomatic exercise at the ministerial level. Nothing concrete is being done to introduce the common people of the two countries to each others culture and ways of living. Staging of a Hindi masala movie (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, titled Mimora in Japanese) in the Japanese Diet is definitely not the only way to celebrate such an important landmark. In India too, people are not much aware of Japanese books and films. Only people who are studying Japanese or are related to Japan in some way or the other, have some knowledge about the country.
My own host family in Japan has a few books in Japanese about India. It is books such as these that give superficial, wrong and insufficient knowledge about India to the average Japanese reader who take even a little bit of interest in India. Misinformation is even worse than knowing nothing at all. I think celebrating of fifty years of our relationship should be in the form of India week being arranged in Japan and Japan week being arranged in India, with a troupe of cultural performers going across different parts of the country and educating the audience through competent interpreters.
The Hindi department of a university in Osaka, Japan, has published a book of Japanese songs translated into Hindi. But sadly, the only audiences for these translated songs are a few Japanese students of Hindi, and a few students like us who are studying the Japanese language. The governments of the two countries should make it a point to broadcast the recent best of Japanese and Indian films/ television serials, with subtitles if required, on the national network of television programs at least over a year long period. These are little efforts which may actually be a great deal.
The youth of almost ever country in the world are being affected by funky hip-hop MTV culture that is ceaselessly being broadcast over television networks. Part of the blame lies with the media that is trying to project this as the on culture that is hip. Apart from the fact that this is not just what America is about, an over abundance of a certain type of program or propaganda means that the youth are being deprived of knowing about other cultures. That is because there is so little to choose from. This is as true for Japan as it is for India. Give the youth a variety of cultures to choose from and see what happens. There will be plenty of choice about what to ape.
The issue is simple. Forget the gimmicks of flowery language, terming something as fifty years of etc. etc. We must decide whether we really want to spread awareness and influence of Japanese and Indian culture in each other’s country or just limit it to only a handful of people who are doing some sort of work related to these two countries.
Notes:
1. This essay was published in Sangam on the occasion of fifty years of Indo-Japan relationship (2002).
2. This was written before I had the opportunity to stay in Japan for a long time. Much remains the same but things are changing. With the internet, there is more information available, though much of it may not be so reliable.
3. Like many foreigners still imagine, on his first visit to Japan, one of my seniors thought that the Japanese people still move about in Kimonos daily. He was in for a shock when he landed in Tokyo and found people in Bermudas and mini-skirts!
4. Historically and culturally speaking, the relationship between India and Japan has been superficial at best. There are many reasons for this. This will be dealt with later. A sequel to this article follows soon. Look out for part-II.
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