The city of Mine in southwestern Japan inaugurated an office in Taipei yesterday to promote tourism and trade between the city and Taiwan.
The office is one of the first overseas offices established by a city government in Japan to facilitate tourism and trade exchanges, Mine Mayor Hiroshi Murata told reporters after the inauguration of the office.
He said the idea of establishing an office in Taiwan took shape after his city and Nantou County signed an agreement last year to foster closer bilateral ties.
Kazunori Furukawa, who will head the office, said the Japanese city, which has a population of a little more than 28,000, decided to open the Taipei office because of the “long-term friendly relations” between Taiwan and Japan.
However, he added that there has been a decline in the number of Taiwanese visitors to Mine in recent years and said the city hopes to revive the number of tourists from Taiwan.
During its peak 20 years ago, close to 100,000 Taiwanese tourists visited the city in southwestern Japan’s Yamaguchi Prefecture each year, said Noritaka Saito, president of a tourism association in Mine.
However, last year the city welcomed only about 3,000 visitors from Taiwan.
Furukawa said the Taipei office would focus on providing the local travel industry with the city’s latest tourist information.
Setting up the office would also allow officials to gain direct access to the preferences and needs of Taiwanese tourists, so that they can provide services that cater specifically to tourists from Taiwan, he said.
In addition, the office would also carry out agricultural promotions, Furukawa said.
Mine is best known as the location of one of Japan’s largest limestone karst plateaus — the Akiyoshidai — and the country’s longest limestone cave, the 8.9km Akiyoshido Cave.
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