The Asia Scotland Institute, a business-academic-cultural platform founded in 2012, is to launch a series of seminars exploring the potential for strengthening links between Scottish business and the world's third-largest economy.

Sir David Warren, a former British ambassador to Japan, will launch the series with a talk on October 22 at The Royal Society of Edinburgh examining Japan's changing place in the modern world and examining its current experiment with "Abenomics", the reform and stimulus programme of the country's prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

The event is a curtain-raiser for a series of ASI events planned for 2014-15 involving some of Scotland, the UK and Japan's leading corporate chiefs, and finance and investment experts.

Warren, the UK's ambassador to Japan from 2008-12 and head of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office's China Hong Kong department from 1998-2000, is currently chairman of the Japan Society and a visiting professor at Sheffield and De Montfort universities.

The ASI, founded by Roddy Gow, former chief executive of Asia House in London, was instigated to ensure that Scotland, which has strong historical links with Asia, increased its commercial and cultural engagement in the world's most populous region. The ASI said: "We urgently need to educate tomorrow's leaders in Scotland by equipping them with the knowledge and skills to prosper in Asia."

For details of the event, visit the website at www.asiascot.com or contact info@asiascotlandinstitute.com

Separately, the Japan Desk Scotland, an educational organisation run by two Japanese academics in Glasgow, will be hosting a series of free public lectures on the subject of environmental radiation in Fukushima by Kimiaki Saito, a fellow with the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

They will be in Edinburgh on Tuesday, Aberdeen on Thursday and Glasgow on Friday.

For more details, see the website www.japandeskscotland.com or contact yushin.toda@gmail.com.