Table tennis players Chiang Hung-chieh (江宏傑) of Taiwan and Ai Fukuhara of Japan met the media in Taipei yesterday, following a news conference in Tokyo a day earlier announcing that they had tied the knot on Sept. 1 after the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro last month.
The marriage has drawn a lot of media attention, as the Japanese press had reported that some Japanese Table Tennis Association officials had opposed the relationship, saying Chiang was not on a par with his Japanese partner, who won a bronze medal in Rio and competed in her first Olympics in 2004 when she was 15.
Unlike most other Japanese female table tennis players who have retired after getting married, Fukuhara said at the Taipei press conference that Chiang and his family supported her decision to continue playing table tennis.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
She did not say whether she would play for Taiwan or Japan.
Fukuhara said she and Chiang would live in Germany for a while for the European Table Tennis Championship, adding that the official wedding and wedding banquet would be held either at the end of this year or next year.
Yesterday’s press conference was limited to certain media outlets, with the organizer threatening to boycott requests for interviews from any media outlet that dared to broadcast the event live on Facebook.
The restriction was reportedly imposed by the agency representing Fukuhara, which had strictly vetted the credentials of Taiwanese reporters attending the event.
However, the Taipei organizer denied the allegations.
“The press conference in Taipei was held in a small venue [the Okura Prestige Taipei hotel], and we had to limit the number of people entering the conference room,” said Chen Hui-ying (陳惠鶯), a representative of the agency that organized the event.
Chen told the Taipei Times that many other media outlets could not get in because they did not receive invitations, adding that it would send press releases and photos after the press conference via the application Line.
Despite the ban, the Chinese-language Apple Daily was able to give a live broadcast of the interview on its Web site.
Association of the Taiwan Journalists chairman Lee Chih-te (李志德) said he could not comment on the organizer’s claim about the venue’s limited capacity, as he could not verify it.
“Chiang and Fukuhara are both public figures. The public has paid a lot of attention to this union, even though it is really a private matter for the couple. However, the organizer should have treated all media outlets equally and not try to manipulate the media,” he said.
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