The event in Tehran will be held during 25-29 January 2012 during which “Gun-en Artists group” shows around 50 pieces of its members' artistic works including paintings, pictures, dolls and textiles. The embassy is also going to hold exhibitions of photographs and children’s paintings of Japan’s disaster-stricken areas of March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Back in October, Japan’s national tourism agency floated a plan that seemed an ideal remedy to boost flagging visitor numbers in the wake of the March 11 disasters. Free flights to Japan in 2012. A full 10,000 of them. However, whatever tourism authorities thought a good idea, Japan simply can’t afford it, the government’s budget planners have concluded.

Even though India is the only large country in Asia where Japan does not have any historical baggage, and Japan has been broadly viewed favourably in Indian public opinion, the reverse is less true. Clearly, this is an area for the Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs to focus on.

In addition, and in his “lame duck” year, Lee Myung-bak isn’t well positioned to pursue multilateral diplomacy beneficial to Japanese-Russian relations, especially given the hardening of South Korean opinion against Japan over historical themes.

My career in anime cultural diplomacy started in 2007 when I was asked by the Foreign Ministry to give a lecture to diplomats prior to their overseas postings. The lecture covered the anime industry and its goals...One of the diplomats in attendance asked me to give the same lecture in Europe...

Sending pandas to Japan is a diplomatic way of boosting civil exchanges and building China's soft power said Feng Zhaokui...of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences...China gave a pair of pandas to Japan in 1972 to commemorate the normalization of bilateral relations.

Japan, once the pride of Asia, might be economically weakening due to its long economic stagnation and the rapid rise of China in recent years. But, perhaps unnoticed, Japan has been emerging as a cultural powerhouse in Asia through its soft power projection.