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A t Yodobashi-umeda, a seven-floor mall in the heart of Osaka, the public address announcements about shopping deals are made in, among other languages, Hindi.

It’s a linguistic acknowledgement of the fact that the big-spending Indian tourist with ‘Visa Power’ is more than ordinarily welcome in more parts of the developed world.

Japan is, of course, a final frontier of sorts: it’s about as far east as you can go without slipping into a time warp and into the previous day! But it’s a frontier that many Indians have conquered, and not just in recent times.

It was the spread of Buddhism from India through China and Korea to Japan in the 6th century that marked the initial interaction between India and Japan. But along with those Buddhist doctrines, many aspects of Hindu culture made the crossing as well.

Many gods and goddesses in the Japanese pantheon share names and characteristics with Hindu deities. And the iconography and forms of worship in many Shinto shrines in Japan today will be comfortingly familiar to anyone from India.

Perhaps nobody illustrates this Indo-Japanese ‘udon-curry’ fusion better than Shigeru, a friend, philosopher and guide, who helped me see Japan from an insider’s perspective. A 36-year-old resident of Tokyo, Shigeru spent some years in Varanasi studying Indian philosophy at the BHU.

Fluent in Hindi (“I can speak it like a Bihari bhaiya”, he says in chaste Hindi) and passably fluent in Tamil, he also plays many Indian percussion instruments, and has fallen flatly in love with India.

My research on his name had led me to conclude that it was derived from the Sanskrit word Sagar (ocean), and when I told him that he was doubly thrilled. Today, Japanese interest in India extends beyond just the spiritual element.

Japanese schools and parents are obsessed with Indian pedagogic methodology, with an emphasis on numerical and analytical skills, and Indian international schools in Japan are doing roaring business.

Walking down a Kyoto street one afternoon, after getting an eyeful of stunningly beautiful sakura flowers in bloom, I came face-to-face with elaborately dolled-up geisha women, click-clacking away on their zori (flat-soled sandals).

Nothing I’d read or heard about geishas had prepared me for this enchanting, exotic sight. It doesn’t, of course, help that the uniquely Japanese geisha culture is grossly misrepresented in popular literature, which portrays them as commercial sex workers of sorts.

The closest parallel I can find to describe them are the tawaifs of Mughal India: skilled courtesans and accomplished court performers who could charm the nobility with their stunning beauty and refinement of manner.

“A true geisha,” Michelle Yeoh tells Zhang Ziyi in Memoirs of a Geisha, “can stop a man in his tracks with a single glance.” Suffice it to say that on that count, these women were true geishas: they stopped me with half a glance!