Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso said it was thanks to Tokyo's colonization of Taiwan that the country today enjoys such high education standards, a report said yesterday.
Aso said he believed Japan "did a good thing" to Taiwan during its occupation, such as implementing a compulsory education system, the Kyodo News agency said.
"Thanks to the significant improvement in educational standards and literacy [during colonization], Taiwan is now a country with a very high education level and keeps up with the current era," Aso was quoted as saying to an audience in western city of Fukuoka.
"This is something I was told by an important figure in Taiwan and all the elderly people knew about it," Aso said.
"That was a time when I felt that, as expected, our predecessors did a good thing," he said.
Japan colonized Taiwan from 1895 to 1945 after China ceded Taiwan to Japan. During Japan's colonial rule, Taiwanese were forced to study and speak Japanese.
His remarks are likely to stir criticism, and also follow his comments that the Japanese emperor should visit a controversial Tokyo war shrine.
Aso last week said Emperor Akihito should visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead, including 14 men convicted as war criminals by the Allies after World War II.
Visits to the shrine by top Japanese officials have sparked outrage from China and South Korea, which see the shrine as the symbol of Japan's militarist past.
Japan's diplomatic relations with China have already been at low ebb because of visits to the shrine by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, anti-Japanese riots in China and a host of other issues.
Late wartime emperor Hirohito stopped visiting Yasukuni shrine after it enshrined top war criminals in 1978. Since becoming emperor in 1989, Akihito has refrained from going to the Shinto sanctuary, which has become a thorn in relations with neighboring nations.
Aso had said it would be "best" if the emperor visited the shrine instead of only Koizumi, who has angered China and South Korea with an annual pilgrimage there.
Aso said soldiers had gone to war saying "Long live the emperor" and not hailing the prime minister.
The Japanese government later signalled that Emperor Akihito was unlikely to visit the war shrine.
Foreign ministry officials in Beijing were not available for comment on Aso's latest remarks.
also see story:
Editorial: Trading one nationalism for another
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