Emiko Dhar moved to Calcutta (now renamed Kolkata) in 1962 after she married an Indian engineer whom she met through her job in Japan. She has lived there ever since.
In the mid-1970s, she started volunteering at Nirmal Hriday (which means Pure Heart in Bengali), a home for the destitute and dying that was set up by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mother Teresa. Her almost daily volunteer work continued until last year, when she suffered severe pleurisy.
In 1993, Dhar converted her home -- a 10-minute drive from Nirmal Hriday -- into a guest house for Japanese volunteers working at the hospice and several other centers run by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity.
As probably the most long-standing Japanese resident in the chaotic capital of the state of West Bengal, Dhar has often been called on by the Japanese consulate in Calcutta to help sort out a wide variety of problems involving Japanese travelers, including serious drug-related cases.
Dhar, 69, is currently touring Japan to give a series of lectures at schools and colleges aboutvolunteering, as well as to be reunited with many of her "children" whom she has helped when they were in Calcutta. As one who benefited from her hospitality earlier this year, it was with great personal pleasure, as well as professional excitement, that I recently met her again for this interview in Tokyo.
What message are you giving to the young people attending your lectures in Japan?
Some universities send students on social welfare courses to my place every year as part of their studies. So, I start by expressing my gratitude to them. I also talk about myself, how I started volunteering and what I do -- and about India. I remind them that India is a country where the gap between the rich and the poor is incredibly wide. The Indian government says there is no longer a caste system, but that is not true. You cannot marry a guy from a different caste. If you are born into a poor family, you are going to have to live your whole life in absolute poverty.
When you think about this, you will understand how lucky the patients at Nirmal Hirday are. They are people who have lived the kind of lives that you could never imagine, and most of them have known nothing but begging. But there, they are served meals, bathed and cared for by volunteers who come from all over the world.
However, for those who intend to come for volunteering, I stress that the facility is very unsanitary. There are a variety of diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer and malaria -- some of which you may contract unless you wear a mask and gloves. Once you are there, though, you have to be responsible for your own health. Taking a rest when you need to is very important, because volunteering is not easy work -- and you will have to abandon many of the standards you take for granted in Japan.
What reactions do you get from your audiences?
I get good questions and bad questions. Some people only ask such questions as whether the water is safe to drink, or whether they will get malaria when they get a mosquito bite. I tell them not to come because I know they can't survive in India. These are the kind of people who keep clinging to Japanese ways wherever they go. If anyone does decide to come, I want them to see good things about India.
What are the good things that you want them to see?
The faces of the dying. Most of the patients at Nirmal Hriday have survived by begging on the streets or at train stations all their lives. But they all show beautiful faces when they pass away. They look really peaceful when surrounded by volunteers. By watching human lives go before your eyes, you feel and receive something.
What do volunteers do at Nirmal Hriday?
The place is not a hospital, it's a place for people to die in peace, though some patients have the guts to live on quite a long time. There are many jobs -- washing the dishes and clothes, helping patients change clothes and bathe. People with nursing qualifications give injections and treat patients. Whatever you do, the most important thing is to listen to the patient empathetically. The sisters are busy, and don't have time to listen to the patients. Actually, they often ignore patients even when they give out a cry. I helped one patient, who was paralyzed below the waist, to become able to sit on their own over the period of half a year.
In Japan, volunteering abroad has come under criticism since the hostage incident involving Nahoko Takato, who was helping the street children in Iraq. How do you feel about this?
It is very sad. Nahoko Takato stayed at my house for a while when she came to India five years ago. She was with a nongovernmental organization, but she decided to part ways with the group and to go on alone, first to Afghanistan, and then to the Middle East. She was risking her own life, because she really wanted to do what she could to help children in trouble. If I had been younger, I am sure I would have gone and worked with her.
When I met Nahoko Takato after her release, she told me that she was saved by Iraqis and imperiled by the Japanese. I do understand what she meant. I have seen many others [in Calcutta] who renew their visa over and over again to do volunteering while they live in a budget dorm room. At my place alone, I have had a total of some 1,500 people -- whom I look upon as my children -- stay with me since I started my guest house work.
But it is also true that there were students who never showed up after they got a registration card [with the Missionaries of Charity]. They spent the rest of their time just waiting for the day they were due to go home. I think the system was abolished four or five years ago, but until then, some colleges in Japan were giving credits to students who just showed their registration cards.
Why and how did you start volunteering?
I think I naturally like the kind of work involved -- treating wounds, cleaning wounds and getting rid of maggots and lice.
When my mother went senile, a care worker came to attend her. As I watched the care person, I began to think that I wanted to do the same kind of job in the future. In my early days in Calcutta, I helped pack medicines in small plastic bags at the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity with other Japanese women, who were there because their husbands had been sent from Japan by big trading companies. The women were always asking each other if the work was making their hands tired, and they were smugly satisfied by doing that once-a-week job. That wasn't volunteering! I wanted to do real work.
I knew about Nirmal Hriday, and one day I asked Mother Teresa to let me work there. But it took me four days before I plucked up the courage to enter [Nirmal Hriday]. On the three previous days, I turned back at the entrance, intimidated by the smell of human excrement. On the fourth day, I finally went in holding my nose. It turned out to be not so bad inside, though after that I began to be criticized at parties by Japanese residents for smelling bad.
Nirmal Hriday can accommodate only 115 people, and after I started volunteering I had several very sick people dropped off at my door.
You have seen many Japanese travelers, not only volunteers. Do you have any opinions about the Japanese who go to Calcutta?
The people staying on Sadder Street [the main budget travelers' hangout in Calcutta], only turn to me when they get in trouble. Those who do not do drugs are nice people. But there are a lot of fools, mostly college students, who come to Calcutta to do drugs. Calcutta, Bodhgaya, Varanasi, Jaipur, Agra and Delhi -- these cities are considered paradises by drug-users. I have witnessed lots of lots of serious cases, and nearly every time a problem arises in Calcutta, I am called out.
What do you do?
I go over to where they are sitting around smoking cigarettes, turn the table upside down, throw water over them, slap them, and call the consulate to send them back to Japan.
What have they come all the way to Calcutta for? I know men and women who were killed after having been duped and drugged by some Nepalese and Bangladeshis. I couldn't tell the truth to their parents. I made up stories that they died in car accidents. There was also a girl who stole her parent's cash card and withdrew nearly all of the family's money to give to an Indian whom she had fallen in love with. Her parents called the consulate and the consulate called me.
Whenever I hear about a drug addict from Japan, or that someone is missing or has died, I go and help the Consulate. The Consulate people can't go into the slums because their cars are too distinctive in such places.
You come back to Japan every year. Have you noticed any changes this year?
Whenever I return, I feel like I have come from a different time.
I am always amazed at how it has changed since the last time I was here. There are always new buildings and roads. I am proud of the country where I was born. Excuse me for saying this, but India is still on the development ladder. Compared to a country like India, Japan is an amazing nation, which has grown so much out of the postwar rubble -- rubble that I remember clearly. I was 9 years old at the time, and I saw the hell of Hiroshima because I entered the city to see my father a day after the atomic bomb was dropped [on Aug. 5, 1945]. He went there, apart from my mother, who was in Moji, Fukuoka Prefecture, after he came back from the frontline in southeast Asia. He had been discharged from the military as he was on the point of death, and was so drawn and haggard that I could hardly recognize him. [For her part, Dhar believes it was her exposure to radiation on that occasion that later left her childless after suffering two stillbirths and a miscarriage.]
However, I am very frustrated about present-day Japan, which is following the United States in every respect. I wonder why the Japanese can't be more proud about themselves.
Would you elaborate a little more?
I sing Japan's national anthem, "Kimigayo," as loud as possible whenever there is an occasion such as a soccer match. It gives me a comforting feeling that I grew up with this song. Maybe I am very old-fashioned because I was born before the war -- but I think people should at least know their national anthems. I am not saying that the government should force students to learn the national anthem. Rather, I believe it is something you should naturally learn as you grow up in your country.
But in Japan, it looks like that the system is not working anymore. Mothers do not know the national anthem in the first place, and the mother-child relationship does not seem to be working well either. I feel sad when I hear news stories about young boys and girls killing their parents. I myself have had girls who do not say "hello" and "good morning." I tell them that even if you are alone in a room, it makes you feel good if you say "hello."
You seem to have a strong identity as a Japanese. Is it a struggle for you living in India as a foreigner?
My husband Sabitava proposed to me, saying: "Will you come to the land where Buddha was born?" I thought, if Buddha was born there, India must be a beautiful country and everyone should be very nice. Instead, it was cows and beggars waiting for me, milling around at the airport exit, which instantly made me want to go back to Japan.
However, the hardest thing was the language and the customs -- and the sisters-in-law. My husband's family was very big -- he was one of four brothers and three sisters -- and they all talked in Bengali in a sitting room. All I could understand was my name, "Emi."
I realized I was a stranger. But even if you do not understand the language, you can feel how you are treated. His sisters kept criticizing me . . . about everything from how to wear a sari to how to eat with the right hand. They all graduated from university and then graduate school, and I felt I was being made fun of because of my education. I did not go to high school because of the war.
How did you cope with that?
I went up on the roof and cried there. I was also keeping a diary in which I chronicled all that I had suffered as part of that family. I had more than 10 of those notebooks. At that time, I was secretly learning Bengali in the market, but never used it in front of the family because it was humiliating.
Then, in my 20th year in India, there was an incident. A house servant used an insulting word against me, thinking I would not understand it. I threw the family dining table upside down and poured out my feelings in Bengali for the first time in the house. They all looked horrified and shocked. I started hating myself for keeping such a diary after that, and went to Varanasi [one of the holiest places for Hindus] and threw all the notes into the Ganges.
What about other Indians?
I think I like India one 10,000th as much as I like Japan (laughs). I hate snobby Indian intellectuals, but I like working for poor people. I love my job of running a guest house. I admire the quality of doctors and IT engineers in India, and hope that there will be more of those kinds of people. I feel sorry that there are so many Indians who can't find jobs even after they have finished college. Many college graduates end up as typists, or on the streets or something like that. And those who are born into poor families are destined to be poor all their lives, however clever they are.
Prime Minister [Junichiro] Koizumi said recently [when he met Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in April] that he would expand economic cooperation with India. I hope this will lead to a better use of young human resources in India.
