It would be a pity if the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, and his CPM comrades see this only as an opportunity for getting more Japanese investment in his state. For Abe, there is a lot more at stake in Bengal.

In his speech to the joint session of the Parliament on Wednesday, Abe recalled many great sons of Bengal — Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Subhas Chandra Bose and Radhabinod Pal — in articulating his vision for a “broader Asia”. “People from the Bengal who forged a relationship with Japan,” Abe said, “were engaged at the deepest level of their soul with their Japanese contemporaries.” The “richness” of that exchange forged in the early modern age, Abe added, is “in some ways beyond what we in the modern day can imagine”.

Abe is likely to expand on this theme during his day-long visit to Kolkata on Thursday. When he opens the cultural centre named after Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, the towering figure of Japan’s Renaissance, he might remind his hosts these two men had crafted the notion of Asia’s spiritual unity and called for its political reawakening in the early years of the 20th century.

At the Netaji Research Centre, Abe might point to Bose’s vision of Asian solidarity. And when he meets the son of Judge Radhabinod Pal, the only dissenting judge in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal after the Second World War, he will express the deeply felt gratitude of the Japanese people for the extraordinary empathy India showed when they were down and out.

Abe’s Kolkata sojourn is not about sentimentalism. He is signalling a significant departure from the dominant tradition of Japan’s foreign policy. After the Meiji Restoration that launched Japan’s modernisation in the middle of the 19th century, “escaping from Asia” and becoming part of the West were the major preoccupations of Tokyo’s foreign policy.

When Japan’s vision of leading Asia came to a disastrous end in the Second World War, Tokyo accepted a subordinate role in the alliance with the US and distanced itself from Asian politics.

Abe and his generation have underlined two central strategic objectives for Tokyo — rebuilding a foreign policy that is rooted in Japan’s Asian identity and constructing a new Asia that is committed to democratic values and freer trade. If Abe’s pilgrimage to Bengal highlights the first objective, deepening strategic cooperation with India is essential for Japan’s ambition to forge a new Asian architecture.

Abe is reminding us of Bengal’s unique role in shaping modern Asia; can Kolkata, however, find a way to live up to its own great tradition? For nearly 200 years, Kolkata was the centre of discovering Asia’s past and debating its future. Kolkata’s great institutions like The Asiatic Society and Greater India Society generated new knowledge about Asia’s past and reconstructed India’s own historic contributions to the making of Asia. The great debates that ensued during Tagore’s travels to Japan and China on Asia’s modernisation and its relations with the West remain as stimulating today as they were then.

Over the last few decades, however, Bengal has sadly settled down to a narrower and more pessimistic world view. The easy slogans of ‘third worldism’, so assiduously promoted by the central leadership of the CPM, have separated Bengal from its sophisticated thinking on Asia and the world.

As his comrades in New Delhi prepare to pull down the UPA government in the name of anti-imperialism, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee might have a few moments on Thursday, when he serenades Abe in Kolkata, to wonder why Bengal’s rich past matters so much to Japan and the rest of Asia. That might, hopefully, encourage him to think more boldly about Bengal’s own future and salvage its rich internationalist legacy from the limiting sectarianism of its central leadership.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University