The Hindu : 'Japan still has economic lure for India'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 09, 2003

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'Japan still has economic lure for India'

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI Feb. 8 . Japan is still a land of big opportunities for India for economic cooperation despite the "economic stagnation" the former faced during the past decade, according to the Indian Ambassador in Tokyo, Aftab Seth.

During its "so-called lost decade", Japan doubled its current account surplus and quadrupled its external assets.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of Tokyo city alone was greater than that of Canada as a whole, while post office savings and insurance funds in Japan exceeded the resources of the entire U.S. banking system and many Japanese corporations such as Sumitomo had a sales turnover exceeding India's national budget, Mr. Seth said here on Saturday. Addressing a meeting organised by the Indo-Japan Centre to welcome him as also the new Consul-General for Japan in Chennai, Ryuzo Kikuchi, Mr. Seth said India's links with Japan even in the historical period were characterised by lack of conflict and "benign south Indian influence" on Japanese dance and language.

Bilateral relations after India's Independence were strengthened through not only the "joy" that an elephant gifted by Nehru had brought to children in war-wrecked Japan, but also by the "lone dissenting judgment" given by an Indian judge in the international war crime tribunal's trial of Japanese accused after World War-II.

The Indian judge was firm in his conviction that the crimes of lower level personnel could not be blamed on the leadership unless orders to carry out the crimes had been proved to have been issued. Mr. Kikuchi said that South India could become the "locomotive" of India's economic growth.

The president of the Indo-Japan Association, R. Veeramani, said there was some basic difference in the business culture of Indians and Japanese.

The latter were slow to develop relations, that too only after making a thorough study of the potential, but tended to stick fast once relations developed, while the Indian tendency, like that of Americans, was to look for fast development of relations. Once this gap in culture was bridged, the scope for bilateral ties would be enormous.

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