I first got a glimpse of Hawaiian public diplomacy a few years ago at the Taipei Flora Expo in 2011. Following a stint in Taiwan as a Visiting Fellow at a thinktank researching Taiwanese public diplomacy, I stopped in the Expo, which featured different countries exhibiting and showcasing their unique flora.

Media Works, the film production company founded by Hoyu Yamamoto, specializes in producing Yakuza movies, almost all of which are based on true events. They produce dozens of movies a year, making up 80 percent of all Yakuza films put out each year. Unfortunately for them, gang expulsion laws were passed two years ago in an effort to prevent Japanese entities from working with the Yakuza.

Traditional Japanese cuisine, known as washoku, is now an intangible cultural heritage, according to the United Nations. Tofu, mochi and miso are a few examples, but it's the buckwheat noodle, or soba, that many consider the humble jewel of Japanese cuisine. It's not easy to find in the U.S., but one Los Angeles woman is helping preserve the craft of making soba.

A new Asian diplomatic row broke out on Monday after China unveiled a memorial to a Korean national hero who assassinated a Japanese official a century ago - with Tokyo condemning him as a “terrorist”. In 1909, Ahn Jung-geun shot and killed Hirobumi Ito, Japan’s first prime minister and its top official in Japanese-occupied Korea, at the railway station in the northeast Chinese city of Harbin.

Chefs Harris Salat and Tadashi Ono both own Japanese restaurants in New York. Together, they've written a cookbook called "Japanese Soul Cooking." It's not about fancy stuff like sushi, but rather, Japanese comfort food - things like gyoza, soba, tempura - and curry.

Just because both invoked the fictional evil wizard of the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, the bickering between Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom Liu Xiaoming and his Japanese counterpart Keiichi Hayashi in the Daily Telegraph has been a huge media sensation. Which is perfectly understandable.

For those who missed the “Voldemort Wars” between the Chinese and Japanese ambassadors to the UK this past week, China’s ambassador Liu Xiaoming, in a piece in The Telegraph, compared Japan’s militarism to Lord Voldemort — the same He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named from the Harry Potter series.