[THE JAPAN-INDIA ASSOCIATION]
Established in the 1903 by 1st Viscount Eiichi Shibusawa and Marquess Shigenobu Okuma, The Japan-India Association is the oldest private organization promoting friendship in Japan.
Following is the translation of an article contributed to their mondhtly magazine.
<Translation>
Opened a small cafe to share delicious South Indian home cooking, and I met the King.
As an individual member, I am the owner of Mysore Cafe, which opened in 2019 and is a 3-minute walk from Nakano-Sakaue Station in Tokyo. Mysore is a city in Karnataka state in southwest India with a population of about 1.3 million people, the second largest city after the state capital Bangalore. I run a small shop in Tokyo with only one store, and it only has about 10 seats. However, after meeting an Indian woman, I had the strange experience of meeting the King of Mysore and being praised by him. I would like to share this experience with you along with an introduction to Mysore, which I love so much.
During my time as an office worker, I was stationed in Shanghai and began to seek relaxation in mind and body. I became fascinated with Ashtanga yoga, and left my job to create a lifestyle centered around yoga. Since then, I have been going to the head temple, K. PATTABHI JOIS ASHTANGA YOGA SHALA, in Mysore every year to train.
It is a historic area where the Mysore Kingdom once flourished, and the Dasara Festival in October in particular attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. The Mysore Palace, said to be one of the most luxurious in India, and the Devaraji Market, which has supported the lives of ordinary people for centuries, leave a strong nostalgic atmosphere in the area. Thanks to the bountiful Kaveri River, it is also a place rich in water and greenery, surrounded by rice paddies and fields. As the kings of the past also placed emphasis on education and the arts, there are many excellent educational institutions, including the University of Mysore, which was founded in Karnataka in 1916. In the library, many people are absorbed in reading books, and artisans are silently working on their jobs. I think that there are many serious and hardworking people.
I fell in love with the city, nature, and lifestyle that they cherish, and especially the food and drinks served at their family dinner table are gentle on the body and fill me with a sense of calm. I opened a small cafe where you can enjoy South Indian home cooking and Indian coffee and tea. I run the cafe every day with my family and fellow Ashtanga yoga practitioners, hoping that people can spend a moment of relaxation and quiet in their busy city life.
We offer South Indian home cooking as a limited number of lunch plates, and while respecting the local recipes, we have made arrangements such as not using garlic and reducing the spiciness to suit Japanese office workers. For the classic lemon rice, we use Japanese rice instead of basmati rice, in keeping with the idea of the earth being one. We aim to create a taste that you can eat every day with peace of mind and never get tired of. The turning point for us, who have mainly been introducing our products to Japanese customers, was when an Indian woman came to our store.
Ms. Shwetha Aradhya, who is from Chikmagalur, a major coffee bean producing area about 170km northwest of Mysore, has been living in Tokyo for six years, traveling around Japan and posting about the charms of Japan in Kartanaka on Instagram (@kannadati_in_japan). After hearing about us, she came to our restaurant, enjoyed a lunch plate and Chikmagalur coffee, and posted about it on Instagram, which has thankfully caught the attention of many Indians (about 1 million views as of the end of March 2025). We have received many favorable comments such as ``They are serving local home cooking in Tokyo!'', and have been featured in Indian newspapers (Hindustan Times, News Karnataka, Times of India, and many others), and the information has even reached the king.
Mysore was the capital of the Mysore Kingdom from 1399 to 1947, and was ruled by the Odeya family for most of its history. The current head of the Odeya family is Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar, born in 1992. He is the great-grandson of the last king of the dynasty and was appointed the 27th Maharaja in 2015. He will also serve as a member of parliament from 2024.
The king followed our Instagram (@mysore_cafe_japan), so we contacted him to say hello and he readily agreed, and we had the opportunity to meet him in Mysore in February of this year. The parliament was just discussing the next fiscal year's budget, so we met at a quiet cafe when he returned to Mysore from Delhi for a few days. The king told us that he was pleased with our activities and about our relationship with Japan. Exchanges have deepened especially since the 1920s, and in return for Japanese dolls that were presented to him, he gave Mysore silk and other items, and Japanese-made sewing machines are still in operation in the silk sewing factory, and Japanese dolls are carefully displayed in the palace. I was particularly impressed by the story that he was inspired by Japan's postwar economic development, which achieved high economic growth while preserving traditional culture. His son is a huge Nintendo fan, and he said he would like to take him to the Nintendo Museum one day. I told him that the Japan-India Association has a 125-year history, and that I believe they can support him if necessary in the area of economic and cultural exchange.
This was a strange encounter that gave me a very valuable experience. I would like to continue to do my best to contribute, however small, to exchanges between Mysore and Japan.