ABSTRACT
The history of relations between India and Japan goes back 1,500 years. Speaking at Keio University, the oldest modern university in Japan, in 1916, Rabindranath Tagore described these connections between India and South East and Far East Asia in the following words:
The message of the Buddha travelling via China and Korea was given the greatest support of the Imperial Family under Prince Shotoku over 1,500 years ago. With Indian thought and philosophy went knowledge of Indian textiles, mathematics and Indian languages. Kukai or Kobodaishi who spent years in China in the twelfth century, translating Buddhist texts from Chinese into Japanese, is believed to have brought knowledge of the Indian script to Japan and developed the hiragana and katakana phonetic alphabet, to supplement the Chinese ideographs already in use. Ikat, tie and dye or ‘Shibori’ and Calico or ‘sarasa’ are textile technologies which came from India and are extant till today; the same goes for indigo which for years was used to dye the cotton clothes of the common man in Japan.
