A few days after arriving in Tokyo, a group of us booked an early morning bullet train ride to Hiroshima. At Tokyo station we went looking for a coffee shop at the cavernous mall in the basement. Many of the shops were still closed.

Outside one, I spotted a small knot of men and women waiting for the shop to open. Even as I looked on, one of them glanced at his watch and began raising the shutter. Within seconds all the waiting people were inside, silently taking up their positions behind various counters. In this country, it is customary to report five minutes ahead to work and other meetings.

No two work cultures could be more different than those of India and Japan.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on his latest visit to Japan — his third in office — characterised the relationship between the two countries as one in which there are “no negatives, only opportunities waiting to be seized”. His Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, who too has visited India thrice since 2014, spoke warmly of Modi, describing him as one of his most “dependable and valuable friends”.

One of the key areas of collaboration between the two countries has been infrastructure development.

While Japan has excellent capabilities, India is in need of quality infrastructure. Japanese money and technology helped in building the Delhi Metro, and several other infrastructure projects, including the western dedicated freight corridor, are benefiting. Prospects of positive outcomes for both sides are, on the whole, bright.

Unmet expectations, however, can lead to disappointment and bitterness. The proposed Shinkansen bullet train project between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, for instance, is behind schedule; less than one hectare of the required 1,400 hectares has been acquired so far, according to a Bloomberg report. Another prestigious project, the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link has seen delays and cost escalations since its launch in 2004. The Japanese, who came on board in 2016, must be hoping that work will finally move forward with the kind of efficiency they are accustomed to in their own country.

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Efficiency and honesty rule Japan. A Chinese colleague of ours had left her laptop on a train. The train company was contacted. Her laptop was found where she had left it, and was couriered back to her.

An American professor mentioned losing his wallet in a nightclub and having it returned with what he felt was more money than before. This culture extends in considerable measure to companies and government institutions, too. Stealing government or corporate funds is rare.

Corruption, if it exists, does not affect the common citizen. Bribing the traffic police, for instance, is as unthinkable as breaking a traffic rule in the first place. Retail corruption is practically non-existent.

Precise and detailed planning is pretty much the norm. It is rare to see anyone rushing for anything, though all deadlines are punctually met. People do not talk loudly, far less shout — that would be considered uncivilised. There is no visible or audible chaos.

All of this is, as every Indian would know, starkly different from how things are in India.

But despite the contrasts, there is also an underpinning of shared Asian values and cultural ties that go back over 1,250 years to before the Heian Period of Japanese history. A Buddhist monk from India named Bodhisena is recorded as having painted the eyes of the Great Buddha statue at the Todaiji Temple in Nara, the then imperial capital of Japan. There are other remnants of a connected past, such as the occasional appearance of Sanskrit names in ancient Buddhist temples, or the scattered shrines and statues of popular goddesses such as Kannon, the Japanese form of Chinese goddess Guan Yin who, in turn, seems like a relative of the Tibetan Buddhist deity Tara Devi, whose Hindu form, while very different in aspect, is Kali. The contemporary cultures of the two countries have diverged a long way from the connected past.

Stopping by one evening at a Family Mart store, I noticed that the man behind the counter appeared to be from the Indian subcontinent. We got chatting. He was a Bihari from Kolkata. He had come to Japan two years ago through a relative who had arrived here before him.

“How do you like it here?” I asked him. “It is a place of rules,” he replied unhappily.

Silently, efficiently and punctually following rules can be a hard task for us from India. Failing to do so is a travesty in Japan.

Samrat is the 2018 Asian Leadership Fellow from India at the International House of Japan, Tokyo

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