The public is invited to the following lecture. A 1,000 yen donation from non-members would be appreciated, but is not required.
Place: Seisen University (3-16-21 Higashi Gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-8642) (map in Japanese), which is about a ten-minute walk from Gotanda station. Turn left coming out of the barrier at Gotanda JR station. Take the road forking right, accessible via the footbridge. Keep going until you eventually pass a pizza and pasta restaurant, "To the Herbs." Take the next turning to the left and continue up the hill until you come to the university gateway on the left. The lecture theatre is approached from No. 1 Building behind the Conder House and is on a lower level; the route will be clearly marked. If you take a taxi from the station, insist on "SeiSEN Joshi Daigaku", not "SeiSHIN".
Information: ASJ Office
India has been known to the outside world from quite early times, through the writings of travelers like Marco Polo. On the other hand, it has been only in comparatively recent times that Indians have turned their eyes to countries beyond their immediate vicinity, perhaps because Hinduism forbade its followers to cross the sea. It was the coming of British rule that provided modern education to the Indian people and opened up the floodgates for knowledge to come in. The year 1780 saw the emergence of Asia's first weekly newspaper, James Hicky's Bengal Gazette, published in Calcutta, and in the early 19th century this was followed by vernacular newspapers in different parts of the country. By the latter half of the 19th century, when the political struggle in India was leading to the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, Japan was known to educated urban Indians as the country which had successfully preserved its independence at a time when much of Asia was coming under colonial rule.
The most famous Indian visitor to Japan was Rabindranath Tagore,who came to this country in 1916 and published the account of his travels, Japan Jatri, in 1919. For many years this was considered to be the first book on Japan written by an Indian and published in India. But it has been discovered quite recently that that an ordinary housewife from Dhaka visited Japan a few years before Tagore and published a full account of her trip under the title Bongomohilar Japan Jatra (A Bengali Lady's Visit to Japan). The book was published in Dhaka in 1915, and the only surviving copy was recently retrieved from the India Office Library in the British Museum, and republished in 1999. The lady was Hariprabha Takeda, who had married a Japanese businessman in 1906, and wished to meet his parents; accordingly they sailed from Calcutta in 1912 on a four-month trip.
It may be wondered why this book failed to attract attention when it came out. First, the book was written for a particular group, and was not initially intended for publication; it contains certain flaws which would not be expected from a serious writer of a travel report. Second, Dhaka, where it was published, was then a remote provincial town. And finally, the towering figure of Tagore made it virtually impossible for any newcomer to make any breakthrough with a single book.
In his presentation, Mr. Huq will look in detail at Hariprabha Takeda's quickly-gained impressions of Japan and make some comparisons with Tagore's indepth observations.
Mr.Huq, who is a national of Bangladesh, is a journalist with working experience at the United Nations, in the BBC World Service and in NHK's Radio Japan. He received his first M.A. in Journalism from Moscow State University in 1978, and added to this a second, in Area Studies, Japan, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1993. Besides working as a part-time teacher at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Yokohama National University, he is continuing his journalistic profession as a correspondent in Japan for a leading Bangladeshi national daily and also as a broadcaster at NHK. He has written extensively on matters related to Japan.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 4", April 2001, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.
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