‘India a spiritual country for Japan’

PATNA: Women in Japan are not as emancipated as those in India and efforts were being made to ensure their proper socio-economic empowerment, Osaka University’s professor emeritus and Padma Shri awardee Tomio Mizokami said here on Monday.

Delivering a lecture on ‘

Indo-Japan relations

: Historical perspectives’ at Patna University (PU) academic council hall, Mizokami said the Japanese consider India as a spiritual country. Even in ancient times, the world of Japanese was confined only to India, China and Japan, he said.

Mizokami, who taught Hindi at Osaka University, said Indian culture filtered in Japan through Buddhism, which is the source of the Japanese people’s sense of closeness to India.

Japan and India signed a peace treaty and established diplomatic relations on April 28, 1952. This treaty was one of the first peace treaties Japan signed after the World War II, he said.

Ever since the establishment of diplomatic relations, the two countries have enjoyed cordial relations. Japan started providing yen loans to India in 1958 as the first yen loan aid extended by Japanese government. India also supplied a good amount of cotton to Japan in return, he said.

Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori’s visit to India in August 2000 provided the momentum to strengthen the Japan-India relationship. Mr Mori and the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee established “Global partnership between Japan and India”. Since then, both India and Japan have been furthering mutual interest by fostering a global and strategic partnership, Mizokami said.

PU vice-chancellor Rash Bihari Prasad Singh pointed out that PU has started a certificate course in Japanese language from the current academic session and sought Mizokami’s help in running the course successfully.

PU pro-VC Dolly Sinha, registrar Manoj Mishra, Patna Science College principal Radha Kant Prasad, B N College principal Raj Kishore Prasad, PU history department head P K Poddar and Patna University Teachers’ Association president Randhir Kumar Singh participated in the deliberations.