However, if you are told that the cast consists entirely of students from Japan and that they will be presenting a play in Hindi, you are bound to sit up and ask if you have heard right.

Yes, you have. On Friday, March 5, Balgandharva Rangmandir will reverberate with dialogues from Kaayaakalp, a play in Hindi by Rajendra Sharma and presented jointly by the Nag Foundation (an Indo-Japanese Association) and the department of Hindi, University of Pune. The performers are Japanese students of the Hindi language at the department of foreign languages, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Japan.

The play has been directed by Professor Tomio Mizokami, who has been teaching Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi at the Osaka University for the last 30 years. Mizokami's troupe has already performed Kaayaakalp in Shantiniketan, Calcutta and Mumbai and will be performing in Agra and Delhi as well. He is well aware of Pune's reputation as a bastion of art and culture. ``Wherever we have performed, the response has been very good. But we are excited about performing here since Pune is a city of intellectuals, lovers of literature and an important centre of drama and theatre. It is a matter of pride that we will be performing here,'' he says.

``Although all the performers are young students and amateurs, we want Puneites to look at the play critically. We are not looking for mere wah wahs and shabash,'' says Mizokami. His troupe performed in India in 1997 at the invitation of the National School of Drama, New Delhi. It has also performed in London. ``We want a critical appraisal of our performance, in terms of serious theatre and not merely as Japanese students putting up a play in an Indian language,'' he says and hopes that serious theatre-goers and theatre personalities will see the play. ``So that we can improve in the future.''

Mizokami believes that learning a new language does not mean merely doing well in written examinations. One should be able to communicate in that language. ``Learning grammar only from the textbook is not interesting. Learning must be an enjoyable experience. And drama does that, it makes learning simple, interesting and enjoyable.

``It also brings joy in other ways as well, like the joy of visiting other places, meeting new people,'' he says, pointing to his students engaged in animated conversation with their Indian counterparts. ``Look, it has made heroes, heroines out of them,'' he adds in a lighter vein.

``Performing in different places leads to cultural exchange and a first-hand experience of the life and culture of another country. It is living knowledge,'' says Mizokami, who uses theatre as an important teaching tool.

``There are many things that cannot be taught just from books,'' he says. Mizokami recalls the time when Phoolan Devi visited Japan. One of the expressions she used was murga bano, a term which has no direct equivalent in Japanese. ``But we understood what she meant because this was a term that had appeared in another play we had performed earlier.''

Books have their uses, but their impact is limited, feels Mizokami. ``After all, how many will read them. But theatre is a powerful medium. A play can reach thousands of people at the same time, and its reach increases manifold especially when telecast on a medium like TV.''

Mizokami is now busy spreading his love for Hindi to his students, but what was it that attracted him to the language in the first place? ``I was a high school student in Kobe, which has a large Indian community. One day, I saw a beautiful woman in a sari and wondered where that pari had come from.'' The years seem to fall away and he is an innocent schoolboy once more.

``She had a strange book in her hand, the script seemed like a puzzle and she was talking to another woman in a strange language.'' The `puzzle' was Devnagari and the `strange' language turned out to be Hindi.

``I wanted to learn something that few people knew. In those days, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a world figure and there was immense respect for him. He was known as a shanti ka doot, and I wanted to learn his language,'' he says. ``However, it was disappointing to see that Nehru spoke mainly in English,'' he adds.

Mizokami sees several similarities between India and Japan. Respect for elders, the joint family system, for example. ``The joint family system may no longer be possible in Japan due to economic reasons but it is still the ideal.''

Differences? The obvious difference is that in India, the individual is important, in Japan, it is the collective. India has had many towering personalities - Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Nehru. In case of Japan, it is the country that is known.''

But it is the similarities that count and what counts is the desire to learn and understand from one another. Mizokami would like to see Marathi theatre. He plans to stage Hindi translations of Japanese plays in the future. ``I have a dream,'' says Mizokami. ``To stage a play where Indian and Japanese students come together on the same stage''.