Governor of Japan’s Chiba Prefecture Toshito Kumagai is asking Taiwan to adjust its import restrictions on food products from Chiba as he leads a delegation to Taiwan. Vice Premier Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) was among those to receive the delegation at the Executive Yuan’s Central Building on Thursday.
In a speech, Kumagai said that Taiwan has always been very friendly to Chiba Prefecture and that Cheng has played an important role in the relationship. He says that Japan and Taiwan helped each other during the pandemic, and removing the total ban on food products from the five prefectures near Fukushima this year has been helpful for Chiba’s food exports.
However, Kumagai says that he brought carefully prepared samples of food products from Chiba for tasting. Unfortunately, he says, some of the items were still being held at customs due to special certification requirements that remain in place for food products from Chiba. He says he will go to the Taiwan-Japan Relations Association to request that these remaining restrictions on Chiba’s food products be adjusted.
Cheng during his speech said that when he was the mayor of Taoyuan, he established a sister city relationship with Narita City in Chiba, with Narita Airport and Taoyuan International Airport also signing a sister airport agreement. Cheng says that Taiwanese tourists are the fourth most numerous in Japan, and Japanese tourists are the third most numerous in Taiwan, both numbers on the rise after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cheng emphasized that all sectors of the Japanese government strongly support Taiwan's joining the trade bloc known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a goal that Taiwan hopes to complete as soon as possible. He said that with total bilateral trade volume reaching a record high of US$88 billion last year, Taiwan-Japan relations are very important.