It is not often that visiting foreign leaders choose to stop by Kolkata. They would rather head to Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai or Hyderabad. But for the new generation of leaders in Japan, the connection with Bengal is rather special. It is the recognition of Bengal’s centrality in the redefinition of Japan’s role in Asia that takes the visiting Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to Kolkata.

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.

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