Renaming Japan’s representative office in Taipei as the Taiwan-Japan Relations Association would help lessen misunderstandings and reflect Taiwan’s burgeoning relationship with Japan, association president Chiou I-jen (邱義仁) said yesterday at the official unveiling of the association’s new doorplate in Taipei.
“While people were clear about what we were concerned with when the office was first established, as time has gone by, many no longer have a clue,” Chiou said, recalling how he once received a telephone call asking him to resolve an issue in Hawaii.
“Finally” changing the name of the non-governmental agency, formerly known as the Association of East Asian Relations, Taiwan, after almost 45 years lends clarity to the association’s mission, he said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
The association was established in 1972 to handle relations with Japan after diplomatic ties were broken off, with its Tokyo branch — the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Japan — also serving as Taiwan’s de facto embassy in the nation.
While officially a civic organization under government contract, most employees simultaneously hold positions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The name change follows a similar change on the part of its Japanese counterpart earlier this year, which changed its name from Interchange Association, Japan to the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association.
“Before we changed our name, a lot of people were not clear about our mission — we even had people calling and asking us about marriage matches,” Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association Representative Mikio Numata said, adding that the renaming is a “historic step,” as its name now conforms with reality.
“The name changes not only help the outside world understand the substantial content of both associations’ work — it also verifies the continued positive development of Taiwan-Japanese relations,” Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lee (李大維) said.
Relations have “never been better or more intimate,” he said, citing record-high bilateral trade and tourism.
Any discussion of renaming the Coordination Council for North American Affairs — which handles relations with the US — would have to wait until US President Donald Trump fills key Department of State vacancies, he said.
The ministry’s Japanese Political Affairs director, Fu Kuo-hua (傅國華), said the name changes primarily reflected a shift in Taiwan’s stance.
Japan had proposed using “Taiwan-Japan” to name the associations when official diplomatic ties were first broken off, but the proposal was rejected by Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) administration, which wanted to use “Chinese-Japanese,” he said.
China yesterday called the name change a “conspiracy” and urged Japan not to send “false signals” to Taiwan and the international community.
“We strongly object to this attempt to upgrade Japanese-Taiwanese relations,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) said. “We urge the Japanese government to scrupulously abide by the principles of the Japan-China Joint Communique, as well as all the promises which Japan has made to China to the present, including holding firm to the ‘one China’ principle.”
“The Japanese government should take concrete action to correct wrong methods and should not send false signals to Taiwan’s government and the international community, creating new interference for Sino-Japanese relations,” she said. “We also want to tell the Taiwanese government that any attempt to create ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’ is doomed to failure.”
Additional reporting by CNA
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has