Table tennis players Chiang Hung-chieh (江宏傑) of Taiwan and Ai Fukuhara of Japan met the media in Taipei yesterday, following a news conference in Tokyo a day earlier announcing that they had tied the knot on Sept. 1 after the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro last month.
The marriage has drawn a lot of media attention, as the Japanese press had reported that some Japanese Table Tennis Association officials had opposed the relationship, saying Chiang was not on a par with his Japanese partner, who won a bronze medal in Rio and competed in her first Olympics in 2004 when she was 15.
Unlike most other Japanese female table tennis players who have retired after getting married, Fukuhara said at the Taipei press conference that Chiang and his family supported her decision to continue playing table tennis.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
She did not say whether she would play for Taiwan or Japan.
Fukuhara said she and Chiang would live in Germany for a while for the European Table Tennis Championship, adding that the official wedding and wedding banquet would be held either at the end of this year or next year.
Yesterday’s press conference was limited to certain media outlets, with the organizer threatening to boycott requests for interviews from any media outlet that dared to broadcast the event live on Facebook.
The restriction was reportedly imposed by the agency representing Fukuhara, which had strictly vetted the credentials of Taiwanese reporters attending the event.
However, the Taipei organizer denied the allegations.
“The press conference in Taipei was held in a small venue [the Okura Prestige Taipei hotel], and we had to limit the number of people entering the conference room,” said Chen Hui-ying (陳惠鶯), a representative of the agency that organized the event.
Chen told the Taipei Times that many other media outlets could not get in because they did not receive invitations, adding that it would send press releases and photos after the press conference via the application Line.
Despite the ban, the Chinese-language Apple Daily was able to give a live broadcast of the interview on its Web site.
Association of the Taiwan Journalists chairman Lee Chih-te (李志德) said he could not comment on the organizer’s claim about the venue’s limited capacity, as he could not verify it.
“Chiang and Fukuhara are both public figures. The public has paid a lot of attention to this union, even though it is really a private matter for the couple. However, the organizer should have treated all media outlets equally and not try to manipulate the media,” he said.
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