“We want to stage the parade as a token of thanks for people who have supported us from across the country," Japan Olympic Committee president Tsunekazu Takeda said. "It will be great if this will help boost the momentum of Tokyo's 2020 Olympic bid," he told Japanese media.

Now in its 20th year, the Regina-Fujioka Student Exchange Program has offered local students in Grades 7 and 8 the chance to travel to Japan and stay with a host family for 10 days. The program runs in two-year cycles; Regina students host teens from Fujioka one year, experiencing Japan themselves the next.

Hong Kong's love of Japanese cuisine will help ease tensions over Tokyo's arrest of activists who left from its harbor and landed on one of the disputed Senkaku Islands, fisheries minister Akira Gunji said Thursday at a major food fair in the city. Gunji said the relationship between Hong Kong and Japan will flourish as long as the culinary binds between them stay strong.

The 24th country I visited as part of my cultural diplomacy tour was South Africa, where I gave lectures for six days from July 30 at the University of Pretoria's Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg. It was my first lecture on the African continent.

As the United States embarks on a strategic “rebalance” toward Asia, Washington and its allies in the region must do a better job making the case for policies that require broad public support. This is especially true in fiscally constrained times, when the threat of sequestration may require the United States to rely more heavily on its friends and allies in the region.

When it comes to diplomatic achievements, often common citizens can be even more effective than foreign relations specialists. In all likelihood this is because, at the grassroots level, interaction on the basis of pure friendship is possible; whereas in relations between professional politicians, words and actions tend to be determined by national interests.

South Korea's president on Friday made a surprise, election-year visit to islets also claimed by Japan, which quickly reasserted its sovereignty there, recalled its ambassador from Seoul and warned that the trip would worsen the countries' strained relations. President Lee Myung-bak's trip to the tiny, rocky outcroppings between the countries was the first by a South Korean president, officials in his office said.

A recent Yahoo! Japan search for “sofuto pawa,” the Japanese translation for soft power, yielded nearly two and a half million entries. While this number indicates the term’s popularity in Japan, it tells us little about how successful Tokyo has been in employing soft power throughout the Western Pacific.