Tsai Mao-feng (蔡茂豐) has been selected by the Japanese government to receive the prestigious Order of the Rising Sun in recognition of his contributions in the areas of culture and education.
Tsai, 71, who has been teaching the Japanese language in Taiwan for nearly 50 years, will be the first citizen to receive the prestigious citation since the two countries severed formal diplomatic relations in 1972.
The Japanese government regularly confers the Orders of the Rising Sun every spring and autumn to recognize individuals who have made extraordinary contributions in the areas of Japanese law, academics, medicine and athletics.
Tsai will be among 34 foreign nationals from 21 countries and areas to be cited with the Order of the Rising Sun, Golden Rays with Neck Ribbon.
A total of 4,057 Japanese citizens will be cited with one of the various levels of the Order of the Rising Sun at a presentation ceremony to be held at the Royal Palace in Tokyo on May 19.
A former Japanese supreme court judge will be the only recipient of the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, Paulownia Flowers -- the top honor. Japanese Emperor Akihito will confer the medal on the judge in person.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will confer the Orders of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, the second highest of the orders, on recipients of this citation.
Other Orders of the Rising Sun, including the Order of the Rising Sun, Golden Rays with Neck Ribbon that Tsai will be receiving, will be conferred by various ministers at the presentation ceremony.
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
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
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