A former Japanese foreign ministry official who quit last month after his government prevented him from visiting Taiwan said yesterday his country should establish official ties with Taiwan.
"Judging from the close cultural, economic and trade interactions between these two nations, it is unnatural and unreasonable for Japan's foreign policy to neglect Taiwan's existence," Kenichi Mizuno (水野賢一), a member of the Japanese Diet, said at a seminar on Taiwan-Japan relations.
The seminar was hosted by Taiwan's Taiwan-Japan Forum in the 21st Century (21
Mizuno, of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said that while formal China-Japan relations were important to Japan, such relations should not be built at Taiwan's expense.
"I personally think that Japan should seriously consider establishing formal ties with Taiwan, for both countries shares common values in democracy and freedom, values that China lacks," he said.
Conceding that such a proposition would be strongly opposed by China, Mizuno said that Japan should stand firm and not yield to pressure from Beijing.
"Japan should not fear raising tensions between Japan and China and curtail its decisions based on presumptions about China's reaction," he said.
Mizuno recently stirred an uproar in Japan when he resigned late last month as parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a post he had held since January, to protest Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi's rejection of his request to pay an official visit to Taiwan.
No high-level foreign ministry official or even parliamentary secretary has paid an official visit to Taiwan since 1972, when Japan and Taiwan ended official diplomatic ties.
Other than cultural and trade exchanges, frequent interaction should also be promoted between Japanese and Taiwanese government officials, for Taiwan is an important partner of Japan, a reality that cannot be denied, Mizuno said.
DPP legislative whip Wang Tuoh (
The possibility of Taiwan signing a free-trade agreement with Japan was also discussed at the seminar yesterday.
While the DPP late last month vowed to push for such an agreement within two years, Japanese Diet member Isao Matsumiya, however, said that it would be difficult to stick to the timetable as a consensus had not been reached between the two countries.
Matsumiya also said Japan was waiting to see how China's overtures to ASEAN developed before exploring a free-trade deal with Taiwan.
Aside from Mizuno and Matsumiya, Diet member Shoichi Nakagawa also took part in the seminar as well as several Taiwanese legislators, including Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) of the DPP, Chen Horng-chi (陳鴻基) and Shyu Jong-shyong (徐中雄) of the KMT and Wu Tung-sheng (吳東昇) of the TSU.
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry
RSS