Astronomical research in Asian Pacific region has been growing rapidly in recent years. However, most important papers have been published in well established existing journals in US and Europe because we do not have high impact international journals in this region. I review the current trends of the local journals of East Asian countries and propose to establish a new regional journal by combining domestic journals.

We have detected a SiO maser line (v=1, J=2- 1) for 15 stars out of about 80 long period variables in the wide range of period. No new sources are detected; all detected sources are variables with period longer than 300 days; no evidence is found that the dust grains in the outer envelope have influenced on this line. The time variation of this maser line for 7 stars, T Cep, μ Cep, U Her, R Leo, R Lmi, U Ori, and R Ser is observed and compared with optical light curve at the same epoch of maser observation. No universial relation between the time variation and the optical light curve is found. It implies that the radiation from a central star does not much play an important role for the direct pumping of the SiO maser line.

Cores of globular clusters are an ideal place for close encounters between stars. The outcome of tidal capture can be stellar mergers, close binaries between normal stars (W UMa type), cataclysmic variables composed of white dwarf and normal star pairs, or low-mass X-ray binaries consisting of a neutron star and a normal star pairs. Stellar mergers can be the origin of blue stragglers in dense globular clusters although they are hard to observe. Low mass X-ray binaries would eventually become binary pulsars with short pulse periods after the neutron stars accrete sufficient amount of matter from the companion. However, large number of recently discovered, isolated millisecond pulsars (as opposed to binary pulsars) in globular clusters may imply that they do not have to gain angular speeds during the X-ray binary phase. We propose that these isolated millisecond pulsars may have formed through the disruptive encounters, which lead to the formation of accretion disk without Roche lobe filling companion, between a neutron star and a main-sequence star. Based on recently developed multicomponent models for the dynamical evolution of globular clusters, we compute the expected numbers of various systems formed by tidal capture as a function of time.