The Taiwan Cultural Center in Tokyo has partnered with the Scholars Network for Education Trips to Taiwan (SNET Taiwan) to produce a series of 10 videos, Enjoy at Home Taiwan Museum, aimed at helping Japanese students understand Taiwan’s history and culture, the Ministry of Culture announced on Saturday.
Representative to Japan Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) on Friday attended a launch event at the center to mark the release of the first video, the ministry said.
Statistics showed that in 2018, about 168,000 Japanese senior-high school students went on overseas educational field trips, the ministry quoted Hsieh as saying.
The most popular destination was Taiwan, which drew about one-third of the students, or 57,000, he said.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many schools to cancel this year’s overseas field trips, the ministry said.
Japanese textbooks for elementary school and junior-high students contain very little information about Taiwan’s history and culture, and their field trips end up focusing on sightseeing and night markets, it said.
The video series would give Japanese students an “anywhere door to Taiwan,” it said.
The videos could give Japanese audiences a better understanding of Taiwan’s history and culture, and hopefully encourage them to include museums in their itineraries when they visit Taiwan, it said.
The series introduces museums and key cultural centers in Taiwan, using existing video clips of the sites, along with Japanese subtitles and commentary by three senior researchers of Taiwan studies who are members of SNET Taiwan: Otsuma Women’s University associate professor Miwako Akamatsu; Teikyo University professor Naoya Yamazaki; and Hitotsubashi University professor Hung Yu-ju (洪郁如), the ministry said.
The series features four museums in Taipei — the National Taiwan Museum, the National Palace Museum, the National 228 Memorial Museum and the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines — the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan, and the National Human Rights Museum in New Taipei City.
Also featured are the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei and the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, it said.
One video per week would be released over a 10-week period on the center’s YouTube channel and that of SNET Taiwan, it said.
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