A cultural night organised recently in the city, brought together Japanese people living here along with Japanese language students from various centres.
Organised by the Consulate-General of Japan, Chennai, ABK-AOTS Dosokai, Tamil Nadu Centre in association with Nihon Technology and HCL Technologies, the Japanese Night ‘Vol 3’ had a veena performance by Japanese artiste Yuko Matoba.
Language students in the city staged a play and sang ‘Vande Mataram’ in Japanese. Members of the 17th Japan-India student conference from Tokyo danced to a folk song ‘Soran-Bushi’ popular in Northern Japan, and taught origami to the audience. Just as one thought that the proceedings would strictly be in Japanese as mentioned in the instructions in the invite, Koji Sugiyama, the Acting Consul-General of Japan, surprised everyone by talking in Tamil. Reading out his speech, the acting Consul-General said the cultural event was to develop good relations and friendship. He also said it was mainly organised for the Japanese language students and teachers and people friendly to Japanese.
There was a live music performance by a group of Japanese association members in Chennai.