A “Taiwan Fair” taking place at Keio Department Store Shinjuku in Tokyo, Japan, has reported a sales performance almost as high as the most popular Hokkaido Fair.
In celebration of Keio Department Store Shinjuku’s 60th anniversary, the department store is holding a Taiwan-themed “Keio Taiwan Night Market,” featuring Taiwanese street cuisine, from Thursday last week until tomorrow.
Coinciding with a three-day weekend in Japan, the fair attracted a massive crowd. The organizer said that it had set a sales performance goal of ￥30 million (US$196,136) over six days, but it has made more than ￥20 million in the first three days, and many food stalls are sold out by early evening.
Photo: Lin Tsuei-yi, Taipei Times
The Keio Department Store’s management has in recent years invited many Taiwanese food brands to open up shops in its department stores, including cooperating with a company under Taiwan’s Yummy-Town Group (雅茗天地集團) to open Taiwanese tea shops in Japan.
The department store has a rich experience of holding the Hokkaido Fair and Ekiben (railway bento) Fair annually. This was the first year that the “Taiwan Fair” has been held.
The “Keio Taiwan Night Market” consists of 30 Taiwanese restaurants and retailers, including 25 carefully selected by Lin, such as Uni-President Enterprises Corp (統一企業), Dian Shui Lou (點水樓) restaurant by Namchow Group (南僑集團) and the more than a century-old Len Jen Bakery (連珍) from Keelung.
They also include Di Chun (帝鈞) Pepper Bun from Taichung’s Fengjia Night Market (逢甲夜市), the Happy Lemon (快樂檸檬) beverage chain and the Hung Rui Chen (洪瑞珍) sandwich store, among others. Some have already opened shops in Japan after surviving the low-sales period during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of the local food fairs held at department stores in Japan, the Hokkaido Fair has always been the most popular and is seen as a guaranteed sales success, so many department stores routinely hold a Hokkaido Fair.
As Taiwanese food has become popular in Japan in recent years, some department stores have tried holding Taiwanese food markets.
Last year, Tobu Department Store held a market that served local food from Taiwan and Hokkaido. The sales performance of the Taiwanese food was almost as high as that of the Hokkaido food.
Yummy-Town Group’s representative in Japan Lin Tai-yi (林太一) said the Taiwan Fair achieved a sales performance of up to ￥21 million in the first three days on Thursday through Saturday.
Although it rained in Tokyo on Saturday, this did not stop customers from visiting the fair, so the sales exceeded ￥8 million, Lin added.
At the fair, many Taiwanese food stalls have launched limited-edition products, such as Happy Lemon’s Taiwanese shaved ice with condensed milk and mango, Len Jen Bakery’s sweet taro Mont Blanc ice cream and Dian Shui Lou’s crispy fried sparerib noodles.
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
China has reserved offshore airspace in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported yesterday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. These alerts, known as Notice to Air Missions (Notams), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert is
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
More than 6,000 Taiwanese students have participated in exchange programs in China over the past two years, despite the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) “orange light” travel advisory, government records showed. The MAC’s publicly available registry showed that Taiwanese college and university students who went on exchange programs across the Strait numbered 3,592 and 2,966 people respectively. The National Immigration Agency data revealed that 2,296 and 2,551 Chinese students visited Taiwan for study in the same two years. A review of the Web sites of publicly-run universities and colleges showed that Taiwanese higher education institutions continued to recruit students for Chinese educational programs without
RSS