President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday that he hopes that amid increasingly close relations between Taiwan and Japan, bilateral economic and trade ties can be improved. Ma made the remarks while hosting a luncheon for a 36-member Japanese parliamentary delegation led by Takeo Hiranuma, president of the Japan-Republic of China Diet Members’ Consultative Council, a pro-Taiwan parliamentary group in the Japanese Diet, that is in Taipei to attend Double Ten National Day celebrations.
Ma said Taiwan was pleased that Tokyo won the bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.
Ma said that since he took office, he has defined Taiwan-Japan relations as a special partnership.
During the period, Taiwan inked an agreement on a youth working holiday program and a memorandum of understanding on industry cooperation and exchanges with Japan.
It set up a representative office in Sapporo, while launching flights between Taipei International Airport (Songshan) and Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport in October 2010. Taiwan and Japan also signed an open skies agreement in November 2011.
Among the biggest successes was a Taiwan-Japan fishery agreement signed in April to end a controversy over fishing grounds in waters surrounding the contested Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) — known as the Senkakus Islands in Japan — in the East China Sea. The pact has laid a solid foundation for peace in the East China Sea area and has won wide acclaim from the international community, Ma said.
He noted that with the assistance of the Japan-ROC Diet Members’ Consultative Council, Japan’s Diet passed a bill governing the display of foreign artworks that will allow exhibits of ancient Chinese artifacts from the National Palace Museum to be shown in Japan next year.
In terms of tourism exchanges between Taiwan and Japan, Ma said a record 3 million people traveled between the two countries last year and that the number is expected to exceed 3.5 million this year and 4 million by 2016.
Since relations between Taiwan and Japan have grown stronger, and since both nations are likely to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the two sides should further enhance their economic and trade relations, Ma said.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
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