Pop Stop recalls those glorious months leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics when many in the international community balked at China’s terrible human rights record. The response from Taiwan: Don’t politicize sport.
And while politics and sports make poor bedfellows, inviting pop in for a “3P” is even worse.
Someone at the 54th Asia Pacific Film Festival, which runs until Dec. 4 in Taipei, appears not to have heard.
Photo: Taipei Times
After Taiwanese taekwondo sensation Yang Shu-chun’s (楊淑君) disqualification from the Asian Games in Guangzhou, China, and a few controversial statements by a Korean official, the film festival’s organizers canceled an invitation for South Korean girl band Girls Generation to perform at the event.
“The invitation isn’t appropriate as it’s a sensitive time,” a film festival official was reported as saying.
Spineless codswallop, Pop Stop thinks, especially considering the band’s popularity among Taiwan’s largely apolitical youth, who will be the only ones affected if the nine-member group refuses to perform here in the future.
Hopefully, with municipal elections past and tempers returning to normal, the Korean kerfuffle known as Sockgate has come to a close. Now, on to the real news.
And what could be more compelling than the latest gossip about Jolin Tsai’s (蔡依林) love life? When the pop diva was first eyed in Japan a few months back with New Zealand stud Vivian Dawson, gossip hounds saw a fairy-tale romance in the making.
Last week, the paparazzi sniffed out Tsai and Dawson heading towards Tsai’s Ruian Street (瑞安街) apartment in Taipei. A few days later, it was reported that Dawson had received an invitation to Tsai’s Christmas concert and it was further rumored that they would spend New Years together. Do we hear wedding bells?
Don’t bet your Christmas goose on it. Though the pair may spend some festive time under the mistletoe, it would seem there is plenty to go around.
“Vivian two-times Jolin with hottie in steamy photo session,” (錦榮背Jolin私會辣妹自拍) screamed a recent headline in the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper).
The rag spotted Dawson over the weekend with a sexy young thing wearing hot pants. The pair allegedly giggled and snapped their way through a shopping trip and then — ready for the denouement? — Dawson sent her away in a taxi.
That’s it. No hand holding or careless whispers. In fact, Dawson spent much of the time talking on his mobile phone — and probably with Tsai, who hours later picked him up from his apartment. So much for two-timing.
In other news, Selina Jen (任家萱) of popular girl band S.H.E continues to recover from injuries following an accident while filming in Shanghai. HIM International Music (華研國際音樂), Selina’s record company, said that though she is fighting bouts of fever she should be back on her feet soon.
And speaking of filming, Van Ness Wu (吳建豪) sustained a minor cut when a rock struck him on the back of the head while shooting a commercial, reported the United Daily News. Could it have been a message from Him upstairs?
The singer and actor was quickly whisked off to a clinic for treatment, but rather than use a doctor to shave off the hair around the gash, Wu’s manager called in a stylist for the trim. After a few clips, the 3cm wound was dressed and he was dismissed without stitches.
Meanwhile, Canadian-born Hong Kong actor and singer Edison Chen (陳冠希) is scheduled to release an album, appropriately titled Confusion, by Christmas.
The news follows Chen’s temporary exit from the entertainment industry in the wake of a 2008 sex scandal. He was quoted by NOWnews as saying the album won’t contain love songs, but rather touch on his personal life over the past few years.
As luck would have it, Jay Chou (周杰倫) penned one of the songs on the album. Chen is undoubtedly hoping for a return to his former success as a singer and actor, and having Chou’s name on the album credits should help.
A recent Apple Daily report said that Chou was on top as the Taiwanese entertainment industry’s biggest money earner this year, raking in a cool NT$852 million, almost double the NT$475.7 million earned by second-placed Jolin Tsai.
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
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