What Japan has meant to India, through a lens of history

‘apan has resoundingly elected asits first-ever female prime minister, an iron-willed conservative witha fondness for heavy metal and fast cars.

- Rahul Sagar

Sanae Takaichi’s sudden ascentand colourful personality may astonish observers, but itought not to surprise Indians aware of the paeans their forefathers sang for Japan. To them, Japan was admirable for being conservative when possibleand radical when necessary. But in this remarkable dualism, they also noticed a wrinkle that deserves our to be remembered.

When the “makers” of modern India came of age in the latter half of the 19th century, they initially sought to learn from Italy and Germany, the other latecomers to nation-building. Romantics rehearsed Mazzini's orations and statesmen avidly followed Bismarck’s moves. But then, slowly, news filtered in of the great changes afoot in Japan. And S0,as soon as steamship routes permitted Indians to travel to North America via Japan, the curious took advantage of the opening. One of the earliest voyagers was Swami Vivekananda, who was stunned by what he discovered. The Japanese, he wrote to his associates in July 1893, were “bent upon making everything they want in their own country’— including riflesand naval ships—while his own countrymen were a “race of dotards” debating the “untouchableness” of food and chas-ingafter “thirty-rupee clerkships”."Come, see these people, and then goand hide your faces in shame,” he fumed.

Initially, Indians believed that the Japanese owed their “unexampled” rise to their “intense craving” for “useful knowledge”. Pointing to the droves of students being dispatched to America and the teachers being imported from there, they praised Japan's willingness to “emulate the West’. Again and again, they cited the famous Meiji-era dictum: “We do not say that whatever is Japanese is good, but that whatever is good shall be Japanese”.