Mainland academics argued that China was the first to discover the disputed Diaoyu Islands and insisted this be taught in schools, days after Japan declared the contrary in its elementary school textbooks.

Having generated considerable turbulence in East Asia with his nationalistic policies, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appears to be walking back his reactionary stance on modern history—at least in public.

In late March, both Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Park Geun-hye visited Germany. While trade and investment were the main discussion topics, the remarkably coincidental visits of the two Asian powers are suggestive. In addition to new economic agreements, Germany may be offering something of even greater value to China and to South Korea: reconciliation with Japan.

South Korea is open to a summit with Tokyo but demands Japan first take sincere steps on historical issues to create the right conditions for talks to produce substantial results, a spokesman for South Korean President Park Geun-hye said Monday.

When you grow up in England, breakfast is an event. Not in the, “Let’s do breakfast!” way that I imagine West Coast movie types emptily holler at one another across busy studio lots, but as a deep-rooted part of our cultural makeup. Take, for example, the ‘Full English,’ a centuries-old national obsession with a symbolic breakfast table heaving with bacon, sausage, and smoked fish.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper departed Sunday for South Korea, where he is widely expected to complete another long round of free-trade negotiations that his critics were denouncing as secretive and potentially bad for Canadian workers. It wasn’t known whether Harper planned to sign the final text of a free-trade deal with South Korea — a laborious, decade-long, on-again, off-again process — or was simply going to announce an agreement-in-principle in a staged photo-op.

Anti-Japan protesters lashed out at a South Korean employee of the Japanese Consulate General in Busan earlier this month as he stepped outside to photograph the protest, sources said Sunday. Japanese consular officials reported the March 1 assault to South Korean police and told them to take steps to prevent it from happening again.

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy on Thursday called on Japan and South Korea to mend their soured relations over a territorial dispute and different perceptions of history. “I think that the two countries really should and will take a lead in this process, and the United States, being a close ally of both of them, is happy to help in any way that we can,” Kennedy said in an interview aired by NHK.