One of the most striking developments in Japanese criminality over the last two decades has been the rise in the number of elderly offenders. Thousands of elderly people who have led hardworking, respectable lives unblemished by criminal wrongdoing have become repeat criminal offenders after they retire.

Three years ago, we published an article in Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on Taiwan's energy debates and an accompanying article in Taipei Times with the title ‘China key to Taiwan energy crisis’. At the time, Taiwan was embroiled in endless debates over its commitment to nuclear power, a commitment that precluded a shift to more secure renewable energy sources. We argued that Taiwan's obsession with nuclear power as the way forward in energy policy obscured other options. In particular, the country could extend its great successes in IT, semiconductors and flat panel displays to the next great technological challenge, namely renewable energy. We pointed to the example of China and its green energy strategy which is gradually replacing its black, fossil fuelled strategy, thereby improving China's energy security as well as building renewable energy industries as export platforms for the future.

The inaugural 2014 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize was shared by Hiroaki and Nancy Sato for So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms and David Pearsall Dutcher for Sagoromo, his translation of the entirety of the eleventh century Japanese court fiction, Sagoromo Monogatari. The Asia-Pacific Journal is pleased to make excerpts from this second prize-winning translation available to its readers. We do so not only in view of the translation's vivid and fluent rendering into English of the rather archaic classical language of the text, but because of its scholarly significance. Little known and read today except by specialists, Sagoromo Monogatari, a work written in close proximity to the Tale of Genji, and in some ways modeled after it, was for centuries one of the most widely read texts in its genre, as made evident by the fact that over one hundred hand-written variants survive today.