Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara's three-day trip on the premium-class scenic train Star of Formosa turned sour yesterday after some media reports and legislators berated the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) for privileging dignitaries over regular passengers during a temporary shutdown because of Typhoon Nock-Ten.
In the Legislative Yuan yesterday, some legislators asked why Ishihara could ride on the train while some 20,000 commuters were forced to delay or cancel their trips due to the typhoon.
PHOTO: CNA
"If the rail and trains are safe for Mr. Ishihara, they are safe for the public, too," said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Sen-zong (
People First Party (PFP) Legislator Lee Hung-chun (
`Different criteria'
In response, Minister of Transport-ation and Communications Lin Ling-san (林陵三) outlined two different criteria of transportation security for a single express train and a normal, multi-carriage train.
According to transportation officials, the signal lighting system on the damaged rail line from Taipei to Ilan was not repaired for passenger transport before 5pm on Tuesday.
"With traffic lights broken down and only one-way traffic, the line between Taipei and Ilan was not secure for two-way passenger transportation," Lin said.
"The Star of Formosa could run because we changed the electric engine to a diesel engine and slowed the pace," TRA director-general Hsu Ta-wen (
Lin said that Ishihara's visit was to promote local tourism and to attract more Japanese visitors to Taiwan.
Japanese visitors are the largest contributors to Taiwan's tourism industry, according to the Bureau of Tourism's annual report. In 2002 alone, nearly 1 million Japanese visitors spent about US$1,132 million in Taiwan.
As the SARS crisis tainted Taiwan's image and sapped the tourism industry last year, the number of Japanese visitors dwindled to some 660,000, with tourism income from them dropping to US$ 667 million.
Post-sars tourism
The government has regarded Ishihara's support to be the centerpiece of the NT$4.8 billion budget to invigorate post-SARS tourism.
Catering to Ishihara's media entourage -- including Fuji Television, TV Tokyo and Kyodo News, tourism officials have strived to put picturesque images of Taiwan on the TV screens of every Japanese home.
On Tuesday, Ishihara and Lin embarked on the Star of Formosa's maiden journey to promote the train tour to the Taroko National Park in Hualien and Chihpen Hot Springs in Taitung.
Inaddition to complimenting Taiwan's local delicacies and clean facilities, Ishihara also expressed disappointment over the "politicization" of his visit.
"This is my fifth trip to Taiwan. I am here to see the beauty of Taiwan and visit some old friends. I don't want the media to ask too many questions," Ishihara told accompanying reporters.
Ishihara, a high-profile and outspoken nationalist, was re-elected in a landslide victory last year.
He attended Chen Shui-bian's inauguration ceremony in May. He is widely seen as a future successor to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching