When professor of Japanese literature and culture Ted Goossen took Japan's culture to Zimbabwe, he didn't know quite what to expect. Goossen gave several lectures to the general public and students on various aspects of Japan's culture from the tea ceremony and ancestor worship to writing haiku.

"What I found when I landed was that the reality didn't always match Western media coverage of Zimbabwe's troubles," said Goossen at a recent talk he gave sponsored by York's Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies.

"I was interested to see what it would be like to present Japan to a very different culture from a Western one," said Goossen. "I was in somewhat of a pedagogic rut because you're always teaching Japanese culture here in North America in terms of Western pedagogy. But with Africa I thought it was a way of circumventing the West."

Goossen gave his first lecture at the National Art Gallery where he delineated a capsule description of Buddhism and Shinto and had a discussion about the efficacy of polytheistic traditions (and the way monotheisms have attempted to stamp them out). "I thought at the time the idea of ancestor worship and the tradition of Japanese Oban would be foreign to my audience but really there's a strong connection to the African tradition even though there's very little knowledge of Japan in Zimbabwe culture. Western ideas about the east haven't penetrated there."

"Interestingly the people didn't seem to see religion as an amalgamation of Christian values and African ancestor worship. They saw it as absolutely 'monotheistic' [Christian]. Yet ancestors are included in many aspects of African life - there's a focus on them. Now the Oban tradition is not followed much in Japan compared to even 30 years ago because Japan has grown wealthy. My African audience saw that as a definite loss and perhaps a price one paid for becoming modern. They knew Japan was 'rich'. They seemed to sense there was a cultural price to be paid to better one's life."

Goossen wanted to point out that modern doesn't necessarily mean Western. "Japan is modern, but not Western. I wanted to see how they'd respond to that, what could be learned from that. The question was do you have to do away with African culture to embrace modernism and prosperity?"

As well Goossen tried his hand at getting students to write haiku (traditionally in Japan they deal with nature or contain a "season" word - a kigo). Goossen said he gave a talk on Japanese aesthetics as a precursor to tackling haiku.

"The challenge I found wasn't so much to introduce nature (because it's all around and very much a part of everyday life, from snakes to flying termites), but to get my African students to move away from an idea of poetry that they'd inherited - a very 'British' idea of what a poem is...with rhyme etc."

Luckily for Goossen (and for haiku itself), the three-line short form, in Goossen's words, "travels well the world over...that's why it's so popular. It can travel, unlike other aspects of Japanese culture. It's accessible and it's a way to enter that culture."

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