A Japanese ascetic stopping over on the way to Lhasa finds time to tell Chandra Shamsher like it is.
A glance back into the past of any nation reveals certain moments when a turn other than the one eventually taken could have altered its fate dramatically. Nepal is no exception to this, and a document that has recently come to light offers evidence of one such moment in its history.
The document in question is a 57-page letter written by one Ekai Kawaguchi to Chandra Shamsher, the then Prime Minister of Nepal, Entitled Memorial, this booklet was salvaged from among other 'useless' papers thrown out from Patan's Shree Durbar and is now reposed in the Madan Purashkar Pustakalaya.
Ekai Kawaguchi was a Japanese Buddhist monk who visited Nepal three times in the course of his two trips to Tibet in the early years of this century. Remarkable for the fact that he succeeded in getting to Lhasa and living there for more than a year during Tibet´s strictest years of seclusion, Kawaguchi´s trip was also one that made him, by his own claim, the first Japanese to enter Nepal.