Hundreds of people joined former Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori in planting cherry trees in Greater Tainan yesterday in a gesture to thank Taiwan for its assistance following a massive earthquake and tsunami that battered Japan last year.
Mori, leading a group of 170 Japanese nationals, joined local officials in planting the first batch of 200 cherry trees at the Yoichi Hatta Memorial Park at an event dubbed kizuna, a Japanese word meaning “bond,” to mark the close ties between Japan and Taiwan.
The park is named after a Japanese engineer who built a canal that helped irrigate southern Taiwan in the early 1900s.
Photo: Yang Chin-Chehg, Taipei Times
Mori and Greater Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) plowed the soil before planting young trees that were grown by grafting a tree species native to Japan onto one indigenous to Taiwan, which the event initiator said symbolized the inseparable bond between the two countries.
Mori said he had planned a trip to Taiwan in May to mark the anniversary of Hatta’s death but decided to squeeze in another visit after hearing about the tree-planting event, so he could personally express Japan’s gratitude to Taiwan for its ¥20 billion (US$247 million) in post-disaster donations.
“Taiwan and Japan have been close friends, and hopefully we can be even closer through this event,” said Mori, who also unveiled a monument nearby and wrote kizuna and the Japanese word for “cherry blossom” on it.
The views were echoed by Lai, who said the planting of Japan’s national flower — the cherry blossom — had strengthened the friendship between Taiwan and Japan. Yang Ming-feng (楊明風), chief of a local agriculture and water development agency, said the agency would work to turn the tree-planting site into one of Taiwan’s largest cherry blossom parks.
The event organizer, a Japanese sports association, had said previously that it planned to plant a total of 5,000 cherry trees in several stages.
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:
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