The number of Taiwanese travelers booking hotel rooms in Japan for this year’s Lunar New Year holiday has increased threefold compared with last year, said Rakuten Travel, the tourism division of the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten.
The number of hotel reservations made by Taiwanese for the spring holiday season has increased by 324.8 percent from the same period last year, the company said, adding that Taiwanese have made the most of reservations in Japan, surpassing visitors from Hong Kong, Thailand, China and Singapore.
For the second year in a row, Hokkaido has seen the largest increase in the number of Taiwanese visitors, with hotel reservations for this year’s Lunar New Year growing by 157.1 percent from last year, the company said.
Hokkaido’s Sapporo Snow Festival and the opening of the first stage of the Hokkaido Shinkansen high-speed rail in March are likely to boost the number of Taiwanese and Japanese tourists in the region, Rakuten said.
Demand for hotel rooms in Hokkaido Prefecture’s capital, Sapporo, prior to the snow festival appeared to have spilled over to cities at the prefecture’s outskirts, the company said, adding that reservations in Noboribetsu and Hakodate this year have increased by 376.9 percent from last year.
TransAsia Airways announced that it is to increase the number of weekly flights from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport to Sapporo, Asahikawa and Hakodate to 14 from seven and that the number of seats are to be increased by replacing the single-aisle jets with Airbus A330 planes, which have a capacity of 300 passengers.
EVA Airways said that it has 22 weekly flights from Taoyuan to Sapporo, Asahikawa and Hakodate, with a typical seat occupancy of 80 percent that rises to as high as 90 percent during holiday seasons.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift