No.79 Visit to Taiwan

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the Tokyo Inagi Rotary Club. I have been appointed as an honorary member of our association, and I attended the commemorative ceremony held in March 2018.
Many guests from the Linyuan area of ​​Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, attended the ceremony. Since its inception, the Rinzono Rotary Club has been a sister club to the Tokyo Inagi Rotary Club, and its members are old acquaintances of each other. I visited Taiwan for the first time two years ago and received a warm welcome in Kaohsiung, and since then we have continued to interact with them by welcoming them when they come to Japan.
This year also marks the 40th anniversary of the Rinzono Rotary Club's founding. The mayor has been requested for some time to attend as the schedule will be adjusted to make it easier for him to visit from Japan, and he will be making his second visit to Taiwan to attend the commemorative ceremony on April 30, 2018, during the first half of Golden Week. did.
Both my last visit and this time, the cities do not have a sister city relationship, so I traveled at my own expense rather than on official official business. However, the Taiwanese people, who love to welcome visitors, did not care about such things and welcomed us with smiles in the arrival lobby, holding a large red banner that read, ``Welcome Inagi Mayor, Dr. Katsuhiro Takahashi.'' It can be a bit embarrassing to take a commemorative photo in front of a banner with your name on it in the lobby of an international airport.
By the way, the purpose of this visit is to attend the 40th anniversary ceremony of the other party, so of course I will receive a greeting from the president of our sister club, Tokyo Inagi Rotary Club, but I will also receive a bowl. I did.
Greetings to foreigners in the local area... Now, I was in trouble, so I was having a hard time thinking about the preparations, but after all, once you enter the village, follow the village, so I decided to use the local language, even though I knew it was bad. I did.
Fortunately, one of the members of the Tokyo Inagi Rotary Club is Mr. T, who is originally from Taiwan and is a naturalized Japanese citizen. The manuscript I wrote in Japanese was translated into Mandarin, and the pronunciation was recorded and sent as an audio file. We practiced all night long before the actual commemorative ceremony, and we received positive feedback from everyone at the forest garden. This is truly a diplomatic statement.
This visit was a two-night, three-day itinerary, and from the next day we toured Kaohsiung and Tainan. Kaohsiung City is located south of the Tropic of Capricorn, so it belongs to the tropics, and its white sand beaches, deep blue sky, and sea are so beautiful that you might mistake it for an isolated island in the Pacific Ocean, and there are also large resort hotels. There was also an abundance of locally ripened fruits such as Taiwanese bananas and pineapples, all of which were delicious.
However, after the change of government to the Democratic Progressive Party, I heard that the number of tourists from China has decreased sharply as Taiwanese independence groups have gained strength.
It seems that there are not as many tourists from Japan as there are in Taipei, but if you have a chance, why not visit Kaohsiung, Taiwan, an island of eternal summer, about 3 and a half hours from Narita Airport?