MEMORIES IN JAPAN

Prof. M Aminul Islam

Immediately after the publication of results of our M. Sc. Examinations I was offered two Fellowships simultaneously to pursue higher studies abroad. One was the IDA Fellowship by the then East Pakistan Agricultural Univrsity (now BAU) tenable either at the University of Tokyo, Japan, or at the University of Munich, west Germany; another was the Commonwealth Scholarship by the Ministry of Education, Pakistan, tenable at the University of Vancouver, Canada. I was on the horns of a dilemma as to which one to avail. However, my employer the BAU authority finally decided to get me trained from the University of Tokyo, Japan, under her IDA Fellowship program. 

Accordingly I went to Japan when I was a young man of 23 and stayed there for about five years. During my long stay in Japan I had to come across so many incidents which often flash across my mind. I shall try to mention below only a few of them.

We popularly know Japan as "the land of the rising sun" but on arrival in Japan on  23 March, 1968, I could not see any sunshine for about a week. The sky was found to be cloudy all the time with continuous drizzle and snowfall accompanied by strong chilly wind. I immediately realized that an umbrella and a pair of rain-shoes should be the part and parcel of my life in Japan. 

After completion of the admission formalities, I went to the Department of Fisheries and met my Supervisor. He took me to different laboratories and introduced me to the fellow students and colleagues as Isram. I drew his attention, "Excuse me, Sir, my name is Islam, not Isram!"He replie" So, I had to accept my name transformed into Japanese style as Aminuru Isuramu from Aminul Islam. 

The following day I met the Associate Professor of our Laboratory. After inquiring about our education system and my performance in different public examinations, he said that your past academic achievement matter little to us. What matter most are our honesty, sincerity and dedication. Then he wanted to know whether I take alcohol or not. I said no. He further asked me whether my father and grand father used to drink. I said no. Then he said, "Your blood is pure, I must protect you". Subsequently he would always found to come to my rescue from the clutches of my Japanese friends who used to force me to take alcohol in the parties. 

In the evening I went to the dormitory for Foreign Students at Komaba to meet our Bangalee friends. They were having their dinner when I met them, one of them told me, "You are late, the dinnins counter is closed but we have enough chicken curry and vegetables, if you can bring a "pan" form the shop just opposite the main gate of our dormitory, we can share whatever we have for dinner."I told them, "let's finish the dinner first then we shall go our and have a pan together. "They all started laughing together on hearing my proposal and said,"Friend, pan is the Japanese word for bread."Then I realize that I must learn the Japanese language to make my life easier in Japan. 

I stayed with my friends in the dormitory for a few days and started to learn the Japanese language. Then Mr. A. K. M. Nuruzzaman and myself managed to move to an apartment with the help of our friends and started cooking our meals in the apartment. On our way back to the apartment from university we entered into a super market one day with a desire to purchase some tea leaves, we asked the salesman to give us some tea leaves but failed to communicate with him as he failed to understand English expressions and the Japanese language guide book was not with us. We tried to make him understand our desire in different ways including physical expressions, but failed. What he understood was not clear to us but he showed us the way to a coffee shop. Then we came our to the super market and started cursing our fate loudly in Bengali, "We have come to such a peculiar country where for a cup of cha (tea) we have to go to a coffee shop and pay at least 200 yen!"Most probably the salesman overheard the term cha, he came running to us with two packets and asked us, "Do you want O-cha (green tea) or Kocha (black tea)?"

Immediately we recognized that the packet of Ko-cha (Ceylon tea) was our desired item. Then we realized that we must learn the Japanese language to make our life easy in Japan.

As we started to go deep into the Japanese language, we came to understand that unlike other languages the masculine and feminine expressions are different in the Japanese language. Another funny thing is that negative expressions are used to give positive answers to negative questions, for example, "Didn't you go to school yesterday?" No, I went to school yesterday". O is used as a prefix to make any expression polite viz. Mise (shop) is the Japanese word for shop but the term Omise is usually used to express it politely. But the prefix O is not use in the case of the name of a person, for example Mr. Sato should not be called Mr. OSato. 

The more we learned the Japanese language and culture, the more our life became easy in Japan. Most of the Japanese people we came across during our stay in Japan were found to be a little bit shy like other Asian people, most probably their inherent weakness in English made tem shy to talk to foreigners. We noticed that the Japanese observe closely a foreigner for some time and if they become confident about the sincerity, honesty, dedication and motive of the foreigner, they don't hesitate to become friends. Once they become friendly, they become real friends. Their feeling for the oppressed as well as love and affection for the calamity affected and distressed people impressed us most. We can't forget their sympathy and support both moral and logistic for salvaging our cyclone affected people in 1970 and liberation war affected people in 1970 and liberation war affected people in 1971. Japanese people irrespective of their caste, creed, political ideology, profession, sex marital status, age group and social status came forward spontaneously to salvage our distressed people. Even the school children voluntary saved a considerable part of their Tiffin money and donated that to our relief fund. 

Most of the Japanese are Buddhist by religion, although they do not usually follow the customs and practices of Buddhism in their daily life. But they have a high esteem for other's religion. I used to come back to my apartment late at night especially during our liberation war period, almost every night I had to come across quite a few drunkards. Many of them used to come to me and ask me "Where do you form? I replied, "I am from Bangladesh". Then they used to say, "Oh you are fighting with Pakistan, how are  your family members?"They continued, "Don't worry, we are with you, let's have some drink together, we shall pay! What ever arguments I put forward to make them understand that I do not drink, did not work. Ultimately I had to use my last resort, "Sorry, I am a Muslim and it acted like magic. Immediately they said, "Sorry for our proposal, good-bye and good luck in your fight against Pakistan." 

We found Japan to be a very peaceful and crime free country. We could move freely from one corner of the county to the other even at dad of night, there was no interference from anybody. The policemen on duty were found to be gentle, dutiful and helpful. General people were very friendly and helpful too. 

In fine, I must say that I am fortunate enough to get a chance to go to a friendly country like Japan for higher studies. Long live Japan-Bangladesh Friendship.

JUAAB Office Address:

Japanese Universities Alumni Association in Bangladesh (JUAAB)
Rowshan Tower (6th Floor), 152/2/A2 Green Road,
Panthapath, Dhaka-1205, Bangladesh
Tel: +880-2-9142792