A top executive of EVA Airways, Taiwan’s second-largest airline, apologized to rice growers in Taitung County’s Chihshang Township (池上) on Monday for the adverse impact a TV commercial for the airline that was shot there has caused.
EVA Air chairman Chang Kuo-wei (張國煒) told Taitung County Commissioner Justin Huang (黃健庭) during a visit to the county that he felt remorse after seeing the commercial causing damage and inconveniencing the farmers, whose agricultural activities were disrupted by a constant flow of tourist vehicles.
“It’s not right that we borrowed the landscape, but caused inconvenience [to the locals],” Chang said as he called for travelers to treat Chihshang with love.
Photo: Wang Hsiu-ting, Taipei Times
The popular commercial, featuring Takeshi Kaneshiro (金城武), a Japanese actor whose mother is Taiwanese, highlights the township’s landscape of extensive green rice paddies.
A road along the fields, which Kaneshiro tours by bicycle in the advertisement before coming to a stop under a tree, has become a big hit with tourists since the commercial was released last year.
Tourists have swarmed to Brown’s Road — now nicknamed Takeshi Kaneshiro Road — that was described as a “green road of paradise” in the advertisement.
The surging number of visitors have forced local farmers to fight tourists for use of the road during harvest season.
Some tourists have even been seen walking into paddies close to the “Takeshi Kaneshiro tree” to take photographs.
Following complaints by local farmers, the county government banned nonagricultural vehicles from accessing the road during harvest season from July 1 to Aug. 31. The ban marks the first traffic restriction the county has ever placed on a road in the countryside.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) is to launch a new program to encourage international students to stay in Taiwan and explore job opportunities here after graduation, Deputy Minister of Education Yeh Ping-cheng (葉丙成) said on Friday. The government would provide full scholarships for international students to further their studies for two years in Taiwan, so those who want to pursue a master’s degree can consider applying for the program, he said. The fields included are science, technology, engineering, mathematics, semiconductors and finance, Yeh added. The program, called “Intense 2+2,” would also assist international students who completed the two years of further studies in
Former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) departed for Europe on Friday night, with planned stops in Lithuania and Denmark. Tsai arrived at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport on Friday night, but did not speak to reporters before departing. Tsai wrote on social media later that the purpose of the trip was to reaffirm the commitment of Taiwanese to working with democratic allies to promote regional security and stability, upholding freedom and democracy, and defending their homeland. She also expressed hope that through joint efforts, Taiwan and Europe would continue to be partners building up economic resilience on the global stage. The former president was to first
Former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Monday called for greater cooperation between Taiwan, Lithuania and the EU to counter threats to information security, including attacks on undersea cables and other critical infrastructure. In a speech at Vilnius University in the Lithuanian capital, Tsai highlighted recent incidents in which vital undersea cables — essential for cross-border data transmission — were severed in the Taiwan Strait and the Baltic Sea over the past year. Taiwanese authorities suspect Chinese sabotage in the incidents near Taiwan’s waters, while EU leaders have said Russia is the likely culprit behind similar breaches in the Baltic. “Taiwan and our European
The Taipei District Court sentenced babysitters Liu Tsai-hsuan (劉彩萱) and Liu Jou-lin (劉若琳) to life and 18 years in prison respectively today for causing the death of a one-year-old boy in December 2023. The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said that Liu Tsai-hsuan was entrusted with the care of a one-year-old boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), in August 2023 by the Child Welfare League Foundation. From Sept. 1 to Dec. 23 that year, she and her sister Liu Jou-lin allegedly committed acts of abuse against the boy, who was rushed to the hospital with severe injuries on Dec. 24, 2023, but did not
RSS