Tokyo: Japan and South Korea on Saturday held the first dialogue of their financial chiefs in two and a half years, agreeing to improve economic ties despite diplomatic frictions between the two Asian countries. Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso and his South Korean counterpart Choi Kyung-Hwan held a one-day meeting in Tokyo, the first since November 2012 and since conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office in December that year.

Toshiko Takeuchi’s fears of her Chinese table tennis opponents dissipated when she saw the unfamiliar players smiling and enjoying the moment. “Just like us, they are simply athletes who love pingpong,” Takeuchi, 67, said she thought during the World Table Tennis Championships here in 1971. She also had no idea that the tournament would help change the course of world history.

Despite the strained ties between Seoul and Tokyo and other challenges, the South Korea-U.S. alliance is “more resilient, deeper and broader than ever,” former U.S. ambassador to Korea Kathleen Stephens said. 

Students at Emerson Elementary learned more about Japanese culture through exchanging cultural artifact boxes with students from a Japanese classroom. Beth Dalin, a third-grade teacher at Emerson, said she hoped the project showed students that they have more in common with students from Japan than they may have previously thought.

Few foreign visitors make it through their first day in Japan without singing the praises of this epitome of Japanese know-how; a contraption that offers both comforting warmth and a frighteningly accurate bidet jet. Now the government appears ready to capitalise on the enthusiasm and is set to talk up toilet technology as it launches a worldwide drive to promote Japan's prowess in innovation for the smallest room, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Japan and China agreed to boost people-to-people exchanges on Thursday during the first talks between their consular officials in three years, the Foreign Ministry said in Tokyo. The two countries also agreed during the talks in Tokyo to expedite visa processing for Chinese tourists visiting Japan who are growing in number.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Monday criticized Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for not providing a new apology for Tokyo’s wartime actions during a visit to the U.S., but also said Seoul’s diplomacy shouldn’t be “buried in the past,” indicating a desire to improve strained ties. In her first public remarks about Mr. Abe’s recent trip to the U.S., Ms. Park said the Japanese leader had missed an opportunity to improve relations with Tokyo’s neighbors

Heading home from a weeklong visit to the U.S., Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stopped off Saturday morning for a nostalgic tour of USC, where he was a student in the 1970s. The brief visit to USC was Abe’s final event in the United States before he headed to Los Angeles International Airport, after a week of diplomacy and economic discussions.