An elderly Japanese man has gifted his prized stamp collection to Taiwan after meeting Taiwanese exchange students in Osaka, Japan, Taipei Medical University said on Monday last week.
In July, 10 students at the university’s College of Nursing traveled to Osaka Medical College as part of an annual summer program funded by a grant from the Ministry of Education, Taipei Medical University said in a statement.
During a welcoming party, a Japanese professor told the faculty and students that local octogenarian Katsuo Kasai had a special request for anyone from Taiwan with an interest in stamps, it said.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Medical University
Kasai told the exchange students that he lived and worked in Taiwan 30 years ago and started collecting stamps after a colleague surnamed Chen (陳) suggested that the stamps, which depicted famous sites in the nation, would help him learn about Taiwan, the university said.
Impressed by the beauty of Taiwanese stamps, Kasai became a serious collector and bought five complete folios between 1982 and 1994, the year he returned to Japan, he said.
The stamp books were his companions and reminded him of his years in Taiwan, but he increasingly “could not bear the thought of consigning stamps to time or to let them rot in the earth,” he said.
Taipei Medical University senior Wu Shao-tzu (吳紹慈) said the students urged Kasai to keep his collection, because the folio appeared to be of significant monetary and emotional value, but he insisted that Taiwan was the right home for his stamps.
Associate professor of gerontology and senior health management Liu Fang (劉芳) said Kasai wrote a letter to the school last month expressing his gratitude.
The letter stated that although he parted with the collection, the memories of his friendship with Chen and his years in Taiwan would remain with him, and that he had no regrets about his decision, Liu said.
The stamps would be put on display at the college for preservation, Taipei Medical University 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