Kolkata :
Once Okamoto Yoshiko starts speaking on the history of Bengal, jaws are bound to drop. Yoshiko, a history scholar of modern Japanese thought at Institute of Asian Cultural Studies of International Christian University, Tokyo, is tracing the untold history of Bengal and the city in connection with modern Japanese thought.
For last few days, she has been running from one house to another belonging to forgotten luminaries of Calcutta in search of documents, old photographs and books to track the vibrant bond Japan shared with Bengal more than 100 years ago.
Recently, Yoshiko was sifting through old books and documents at the house of Tapan Sen, great grandson of Narendranath Sen (1843-1911), the founder-editor of nationalist newspaper, Indian Mirror.
“He was a liberal Hindu, with a deep interest in other religions, particularly Buddhism. He was the founder of the Theosophical Society of Bengal,” Yoshiko said.
Yoshiko is working towards a book on an international religious conference that was to be held in Japan — a cancelled event at Kyoto in 1903. The key mover of the conference was Okakura Kakuzo (1863 -1913). This was after Kakuzo and art historian and Japanese monk Oda Tokuno came to Kolkata in 1902 and 1903 and met literary, cultural and spiritual luminaries like Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita. Narendranath Sen was elected chairman of the committee for the religious conference, Yoshiko said.
Why did the conference not shape up? “One of the reasons was the premature death of Swami Vivekananda. Without him the conference would have lost its sheen. There were other reasons as well. But the cancelled conference became a threshold of modern Japanese thought and forged an international intellectual network. With the idea of one-Asia, Kakuzo ceased to identify himself as Japanese but an Asian,” Yoshiko explained. The conference evoked world-wide response. Two Indian monks — Swami Rama Tirtha and Agamiya Parama Tattava — travelled to Tokyo for the conference.
Kakuzo had some wonderful intellectual exchanges with Narendranath Sen, who first interviewed Vivekananda after his return to India. In fact, Narendranath was the prime mover behind Vivekananda’s supposed participation at the Kyoto conference, the scholar explained. Yoshiko was sad that the original house of Narendranath Sen was razed.
Like Tagore, Kakuzo’s prophesy in his book, ‘The Ideas of the East’, proved true a century later, she said. “He noted that Japan’s rapid modernization was not universally applauded in Asia,” Yoshiko said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Kolkata / by Krishnendu Bandyopadhyay, TNN / November 13th, 2014