For five days this July, a hilltop university in southern Japan looked and sounded remarkably like Bangladesh.
Students walked beneath rows of red-and-green flags.
A brightly painted rickshaw stood beside a traditional bioscope.
The aroma of steaming khichuri and freshly fried shingara drifted across the campus as long queues formed for Bangladeshi food, tea, and intricate henna designs.
The setting was Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) in Beppu, a Japanese city famous for its hot springs.
Yet from July 6 to 10, the campus was transformed into a vibrant celebration of Bangladeshi culture.
Bangladesh Week 2026, part of APU’s annual multicultural program, showcased the country’s food, music, fashion, cinema, folklore, and theater to one of the world’s most internationally diverse student communities.
Organized by a 27-member committee, the festival brought together hundreds of volunteers, performers, and students from more than 100 countries.
For APU’s 324 Bangladeshi students, it was more than a cultural festival. It was an opportunity to tell the story of Bangladesh on their own terms.
A campus transformed
This year’s festival drew inspiration from Bangladesh’s monsoon season and the ways rain shapes the country’s landscape, memories, and artistic traditions.
The opening ceremony embraced the theme almost poetically.
As a light drizzle fell over the university fountain on July 6, Bangladeshi students launched the festival with music and dance during a break between classes.
Students rushing across campus paused to watch.
Others gathered around the rickshaw and bioscope, objects deeply familiar to Bangladeshis but entirely new to many international visitors.
Rather than presenting culture from behind exhibition boards, the organizers invited people to become part of it.
International students wore saris and panjabis, tried henna, sampled Bangladeshi cuisine, and spoke with volunteers about traditions, festivals, and everyday life.
What might have been a conventional cultural exhibition instead became a shared experience.
Food that crossed every language barrier
If there was one universal language during Bangladesh Week, it was food.
Stalls serving chicken khichuri, fuchka, shingara, tea, laddus, and semai barfi quickly became the busiest corners of the campus.
Students, professors, local residents, and visiting families lined up together, many tasting Bangladeshi cuisine for the first time.
Some arrived already familiar with South Asian flavors. Others simply followed the aromas.
European faculty members sampled khichuri alongside Japanese children, while international students returned repeatedly for cups of tea and traditional sweets.
The enthusiasm continued well beyond the opening day. Henna artists worked almost continuously as visitors waited patiently to have intricate designs painted on their hands.
Food and body art proved to be natural conversation starters. Even when language became a barrier, taste and creativity provided common ground.
Cinema, music and folklore
The celebrations shifted indoors on July 7 with Chhayachhobi, a musical tribute to Bengali cinema and the songs of the 1990s.
Performers danced to beloved hits including Gulbahar, Premi O Premi, and Mon Shudhu Mon Chhuyechhe, while Bangladeshi and international students shared the stage.
One of the evening’s most memorable moments came when a Japanese student performed the Bengali song Shada Kalo Prem, drawing enthusiastic applause from an audience that filled the student hall.
The program introduced international viewers to a nostalgic chapter of Bangladeshi popular culture through music, choreography, and costume.
A different side of Bangladesh appeared two days later.
The festival’s first formal film screening featured Nuhash Humayun’s acclaimed horror anthology Pett Kata Shaw.
Presented as Deshi Movie Night, the screening introduced audiences to Bengali folklore through supernatural storytelling.
Although many viewers were unfamiliar with the cultural references, the reactions required no translation.
Gasps, nervous laughter, and hands covering faces during frightening scenes demonstrated that horror travels remarkably well across cultures.
The screening also broadened perceptions of Bangladesh, revealing a contemporary film industry capable of producing sophisticated genre cinema alongside the country’s better-known cultural traditions.
Folklore comes alive
The festival reached its climax on July 10 at Millennium Hall.
Opening with a choir performance of Rabindranath Tagore’s Anondoloke Mongolaloke, the Grand Show unfolded through dance, fashion, and theater.
A folklore-inspired fashion segment brought Bengali mythology to life through elaborate costumes portraying Bonbibi, Dakkhin Rai, Behula, Lakhindar, Manasa, snake charmers, mermaids, and the haunting shakchunni.
For many international audience members, these were unfamiliar characters. Yet costume, movement, and lighting transformed centuries-old folklore into a performance that transcended language.
The evening concluded with Wanna Know a Secret?, a theatrical adaptation of Golam Momit’s story Ekta Gopon Kotha, originally published in the children’s magazine Kishor Alo.
Following a young girl named Munia as she journeys into a world of imagination, the production blended Bengali folk characters with elements inspired by Japanese tradition, reflecting both the location of the performance and the multicultural identities of its cast.
Humor, fantasy, and frequent applause carried the production to its finale.
More than a festival
Bangladesh Week also drew official recognition.
Bangladesh’s Ambassador to Japan, Md Daud Ali, attended the Grand Show and met APU President Hiroshi Yoneyama to discuss ways of making the university an even more welcoming destination for Bangladeshi students.
The ambassador praised the organisers for presenting Bangladesh through culture, creativity, and student leadership, describing such initiatives as valuable contributions to strengthening people-to-people ties between Bangladesh and Japan.
Months of planning went into coordinating performances, costumes, stage design, food stalls, and logistics. Volunteers from Bangladesh and numerous other countries worked side by side long before the first visitor arrived.
When the festival finally ended, the flags came down, the food stalls disappeared, and the campus returned to its everyday routine.
But for hundreds of students, Bangladesh had become something more than a country on a map.
It had become the taste of khichuri, the rhythm of a Bengali song, the thrill of a ghost story, the colors of a rickshaw, and the warmth of conversations shared across cultures.
For the Bangladeshi students who made it all happen, that may have been the festival’s greatest achievement.