What Japan Taught Me and What I Still Want India to Learn.

The evening is still. The Ganga flows past grey and wide. My dog stirs in his sleep. And I think of Japan.

Ten days in July 1893 — from Kobe to Yokohama, by train through Osaka and Kyoto and Tokyo. A people clean as any I had seen. Temples where my own people's Sanskrit mantras stood in old Bengali script on the wall. A nation that had taken what the West knew — machines, trains, schools, organisation — and lost nothing of its own soul. They did not become Englishmen. They became themselves, only stronger.

I wrote from the Oriental Hotel in Yokohama on the tenth of July: "Only I want that numbers of our young men should pay a visit to Japan and China every year. Especially to the Japanese, India is still the dreamland of everything high and good." I meant every word. I still do.

What I saw with my own eyes: a people who kept their temples and their manners and yet ran trains on time, whose children went to school in their own dress, whose shops and streets were swept and orderly. That is the thing. Not that they copied the West. That they took what served them and left the rest. The Sanskrit mantras on their temple walls — our own mantras, in our own script — told me they had not forgotten where the light first came. But they had added to it.

I never went back to Japan. I meant to. In 1901 my friend Okakura Kakuzo, the art scholar, sent me three hundred rupees for the passage. Joe pressed me from there. But the plan came to nothing. By April 1902 I wrote to a friend: "the plan of going to Japan seems to have come to nought." And a month later I said I was going to retire for good, and if I could, go back to my old days of begging. I did not get there. Perhaps my body could not take another voyage. Perhaps the work here called too loud. I do not know.

But what I wanted then I want still. Let the young men and women of India go to Japan. Not as tourists — as students. Watch one thing: how a small, poor island taught every child to read and write, and made that the foundation of its strength. That is the secret. Not machines first. Schools first. Come back and do the same thing here, in your own way, with your own gods and your own language and your own soil.

The light is fading. I must go in. But this thought stays with me: India gave Japan her Buddha. Japan can give India back a lesson in how to live in the modern world without losing the ancient one.