The Tourism Bureau premiered a TV commercial yesterday featuring the popular boy band F4, scheduled to be broadcast in Japan and Korea starting next month.
The 30-second TV spot is part of the bureau's aggressive marketing campaign to increase the number of Japanese and Korean tourists visiting Taiwan each year.
The story begins with a Japanese tourist receiving a letter from Taiwan, then shifts to four famous local scenic spots, which are visited by the F4 members.
PHOTO: LIAO CHEN-HUEI, TAIPEI TIMES
Jerry Yan (言承旭) appears in an exhibition room at the National Palace Museum, looking at Chinese calligraphy and then becoming one of the characters in an ancient painting.
Vanness Wu (吳建豪) is first seen playing with a lantern in Pingsi (平溪), Taipei County. Two seconds later, Taipei 101 is seen, amid exploding fireworks.
Ken Chu (
Meanwhile, Vic Chou (周渝民) is seen playing with a Taiwanese puppet, with the traditional art center in Ilan County in the background.
The bureau's director general Janice Lai (賴瑟珍) said yesterday that the commercial will appear on 14 TV stations in Japan and three in Korea.
Lai said that a TV series featuring F4 will also begin shooting next month. Based on the contract, the series will be broadcast by the end of this year.
Lai also confirmed that Yan will not be in the TV series due to prior obligations. While Chu and Chou are guaranteed to be in the series, Lai said the bureau was working to get Wu on board.
To Lai, the commercial was a gratifying experience.
"Many Japanese tourists are impressed by the snacks at the night markets, the fortune-tellers or the Hsiaolongbao [little steamed buns]," she said." What we are trying to create is a fresher image. Through the charm of these four people, we hope to give our guests a better understanding of Taiwan."
Besides the TV networks, the commercial will also feature on flights from Japan and Korea before they land in Taiwan.
The bureau is hoping to increase the number of Japanese tourists to 1.23 million and that of Koreans to 210,000 annually.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: