Japan and India : A Historical Connect

India and Japan are the two very significant Asian countries of the globe. While India is the largest democracy, Japan is one of the biggest economies of the world. In today’s globalised world, every country remains dependent on the other for the survival of the existing international order. This was not an exception even speaking about centuries back. The ancient great world civilizations, e.g. the Indus valley civilization, the Mesopotamian civilization, show traces of inter-state relations. Modern world calls this network of bilateral and multilateral relations among the sovereign units as foreign policy. Thus, foreign policies epitomize the aspirations, expectations, national interests, power politics and strategic concerns of a nation-state vis-à-vis the other, conditioned by the economic resources and popular trust. India experienced a long colonial history which bled its economic, military and political strength for long. Hence, determining India’s own course of self-reliant bilateral relations was not practicable in the pre-independent era. Interestingly, even though geographically distant, India and Japan shared a common historical and cultural heritage since 6^th century B.C. Indeed, this understanding becomes essential for an analysis of India’s post-independent foreign policy in general and Indo-Japan relations in particular. The traces of the prevailing warm relations between the two nations have been well laid in their age old inheritance.

Keywords:
International Relations , National interest, Democracy