Visiting former Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori said yesterday that the US' friendship with Taiwan was solid and spoke of firm ties between Japan and Taiwan, while Beijing repeated its protest against Mori's trip.
Mori reassured Taiwan over its relationships with Japan and the US during a dinner banquet he hosted for the Taiwanese alumni of Japan's Waseda University and Keio University in Taipei's Grand Formosa Regent Hotel, where he is staying during his three-day private visit.
Lo Fu-chen (羅福全), representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Japan, and Hsu Shui-teh (許水德), president of Taiwan's Association of East Asian Relations, accompanied Mori to the banquet.
The banquet started at around 6:30pm and Mori left the hotel before 8pm. According to Hsu, Mori left the dinner early to meet with his old friend Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫), chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation, Taiwan's semi-official body handling cross-strait affairs.
Banquet participants quoted Mori as saying that "the US has treated Taiwan better than it has done Japan" because Taiwan's geographic position is important to the US.
Mori talked a lot about rugby during the dinner, participants said.
Banquet guests included national policy advisers Huang Tien-lin (
Mori met with former president Lee Teng-hui (
Prime minister from 2000 to 2001, Mori defied pressure from China and at home, including from his then-minister of foreign affairs Yohei Kono, to issue a visa to Lee so that he could undergo heart surgery in Osaka in April 2001.
Still influential in Japan's politics, Mori's faction occupies 51 of his Liberal Democratic Party's 245 seats in the 480-seat Japanese House of Representatives.
Mori is a supporter of current Japanese Prime Junichiro Koizumi, who is also a member of the Mori faction.
After his meeting with Lee yesterday, Mori's heavily guarded motorcade drove him to an undisclosed location at Shihlin. Mori was tight-lipped in his public appearances and declined to answer questions from reporters.
At around 3:30pm, accompanied by Lo, Mori visited the family of his late friend Lin Chin-ching (
Lin, also a national policy adviser and former president of the Association of East Asian Relations, passed away on Dec. 10. Mori paid tribute to his friend and told Lin's five children to take care of Lin's 79-year-old wife Wu Ai-kuei (吳愛桂).
Meanwhile, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested against Mori's visit to Taiwan yesterday.
NHK, Japan's public broadcast network, yesterday reported that Mori told President Chen Shui-bian (
The report quoted Mori as telling Chen to consider the difficulties faced by the US, now preoccupied with Iraq and North Korea.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
SECURITY RISK: If there is a conflict between China and Taiwan, ‘there would likely be significant consequences to global economic and security interests,’ it said China remains the top military and cyber threat to the US and continues to make progress on capabilities to seize Taiwan, a report by US intelligence agencies said on Tuesday. The report provides an overview of the “collective insights” of top US intelligence agencies about the security threats to the US posed by foreign nations and criminal organizations. In its Annual Threat Assessment, the agencies divided threats facing the US into two broad categories, “nonstate transnational criminals and terrorists” and “major state actors,” with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea named. Of those countries, “China presents the most comprehensive and robust military threat
RSS