Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is to visit Japan next month to learn about Tokyo’s preparations for the 2020 Olympic Games and the latest developments in Japan’s long-term care system.
Ko announced his planned trip on the sidelines of a city government meeting to review transportation policies. An itinerary later released by Ko’s aides showed he is to visit Tokyo, Yokohama and Osaka from Jan. 24 to Jan. 30.
Ko said that he hoped to learn about Tokyo’s logistics planning for the 2020 Olympics and absorb some of Tokyo’s know-how on arranging the event to help the Taipei City Government organize the 2017 Summer Universiade.
Another topic of the fact-finding tour would be Japan’s long-term care system, as Japan had become an aging society before Taiwan and has more extensive experience in the field, Ko said.
Ko said he also plans to derive inspiration from Japan’s cultural and creative industries to help Taipei market its own culture, as “Taiwan and Japan have similar cultures.”
He said that as Japan is the nation’s “other neighboring powerful nation,” maintaining a rapport is another important mission of his visit.
Ko’s aides said he is scheduled to visit Tokyo during the first three days of his trip and is to visit the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the city council before setting out to Yokohama and Osaka, where he plans to spend two days each.
While Ko’s itinerary shows that he is expected to meet with local politicians, Ko said that it was still unclear whether he would be received by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s brother, Nobuo Kishi.
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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