A concert was held in Penghu County on Thursday to mark the 122nd anniversary of the Japanese occupation of the outlying islands.
About 100 people attended the concert at a monument in Lizhengjiao (裡正角), the area where Japanese forces landed in Penghu on March 23, 1895.
The monument was established by Japanese commemorating the army’s landing and was renamed the Retrocession Monument in 1945.
Photo: Liu Yu-ching, Taipei Times
The concert was aimed at conveying a message of peace and love to the world through music, concert organizers said.
Japanese flutist Minoru Yano performed Japanese folk song The Moon Over the Ruined Castle and Taiwanese folk song The Torment of a Flower (雨夜花).
Huxi Township (湖西) Mayor Wu Cheng-chieh (吳政杰) on Wednesday said at a forum on the history of the Japanese occupation that Penghu had played a crucial role during that period and that the people had learned valuable lessons from it.
Yang Meng-cheh (楊孟哲), a National Taipei University of Education professor, presented photographs of Lizhengjiao from more than 100 years ago, while Aimen Elementary School teacher Hsu Yu-he (許玉河) told the audience that Magong (馬公) and Lizhengjiao are both names retained from the Japanese colonial period.
In 1895, Taiwan, including the Penghu islands, became a Japanese colony via the Treaty of Shimonoseki following the First Sino-Japanese War.
On March 23 that year, Japanese forces landed at Lizhengjiao in Penghu, a strategic gateway to Taiwan.
In related news, Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association Kaohsiung Office Director Fumio Yamashita on Thursday visited Penghu County Commissioner Chen Kuang-fu (陳光復) to express interest in establishing an office in the county and a tourism platform to advertise the beauty of Penghu to Japanese.
Yamashita also visited the county’s windmills, solar power facilities and a marine life propagation station with government officials.
He said Penghu has the most beautiful bay in the world and said he hopes the association could set up an office in the county so both parties could develop a close relationship in tourism, “renewable energy” and small and medium-sized business exchanges.
Chen said he had visited the Japanese island of Okinawa and Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture to learn about tourism and is promoting charter flights between Penghu and Okinawa.
Additional reporting by Liu Yu-ching
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS