One would think India and Japan would be a marriage made in geopolitical heaven. Japan has a big problem with China and is today seeking to beef up its defences against Beijing and find an alternate site for the billions of investments Japanese firms made in China. Read more

Global Health Strategies, an NGO that works with the Gates Foundation and other groups, recently released a report on the so-called BRICS countries and global public health. Their main point was that the BRICS countries had an increasingly and largely invisible role in world health, especially among the poorest of the poor. Read more

It’s become a tradition for Japanese Prime Minister’s to squeeze in their summit visit to India just before year’s end and just before official Tokyo shuts down. It is not that New Delhi requires it, but the Japanese seem determined to show how importantly they take this relationship. Read more

The East Asia Summit has begun in Bali, Indonesia, and is generating a lot more interest than such powwows normally do. The reason: we are seeing a recommitment by the United States to maintaining the stability of the Indo-Pacific area. Read more

What ails the world economy? Please take a look at the Economist’s debt clock to understand what’s the problem. The world governments’ debt is $ 40 trillion and, as the clock ticks away before your eyes, is increasing rapidly. Read more

Indian refineries which import crude from Iran are running around in circles. With the third week of July over, Tehran has not intimated whether crude will be sent in August. Read more

Japan is on the nuclear brink, the jasmine revolution is withering and the Indian parliament is in an uproar over a Wikileak document about how money was used to buy votes in favour of the Indo-US nuclear deal. Having immersed myself all day in these issues, I will write about something completely different. Read more

Japan isn’t in the best of shape, but at least no one has lost their traditional bashful politeness. In Tokyo for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s potentially path-breaking state visit to Japan, I was trying hard to put together a list of the recent prime ministers of Japan. Read more

Islands are all the rage in Northeast Asia. And rage is the word. The Hindustan Times has already received a letter from the Japanese Embassy complaining that there is no dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands. Read more

There is a vague sense among many Indians that Japan is a nice country with polite people and both are in genteel decline. “Haven’t they been in recession for over 20 years?” I am often asked. Asia’s number two economy isn’t a write-off yet. Read more