JAPAN TODAY

 

TAIPEI — Japanese actress Masami Nagasawa will be the spokeswoman for Taiwan’s tourism in Japan for the coming year, the island’s Tourism Bureau said Monday, marking the first time a woman was picked for the position.

Wayne Liu, the bureau’s deputy director general, told a press conference in Taipei that as Taiwan sees an increasing number of female visitors, he hopes Nagasawa will attract more Japanese tourists to Taiwan, especially women.

The 29-year-old actress, who is in Taiwan to make a promotional film for the Tourism Bureau, told the same press conference that she felt honored to be chosen.
“Taiwan is like my second hometown,” she said.

Nagasawa said she believes she was picked because of her role in a Taiwanese television drama in 2014 during which she stayed in Taiwan for nearly six months.

The promotional film is scheduled to be shown in Japan in the middle or at end of next month.

Records show that the number of female visitors to Taiwan has continued to grow since 2013, when it totaled about four million and first outnumbered that of their male counterparts. The figure rose to over five million in 2014 and more than 5.5 million last year.

Nagasawa said she spoke very little Chinese when she first arrived in 2012, but many kind people later taught her.

Among her favorite places are Tainan City in the south, Taichung in central Taiwan and Tamsui, a seaside district of New Taipei City.
Takuya Kimura, a member of SMAP, one of Japan’s most popular and longest-lived pop groups, and an actor, was the bureau’s tourism spokesman last year.

Statistics showed that the number of visitors from Japan grew by nearly 18 percent from January to July compared with the same period last year, and the number of visitors in August increased by 30 percent also from a year earlier.

The total number of Japanese visitors last year was more than 1.6 million. The bureau hopes the figure would grow to two million per year.

The administration of President Tsai Ing-wen has been making efforts to lure more foreign visitors to Taiwan as the number of Chinese visitors has been dropping since May, when Tsai took office. Tsai leads the Democratic Progressive Party, which has traditionally been more skeptical of closer ties with China.

Data indicated that the number of visitors from mainland China increased by only 0.42 percent from January to July, while that of visitors from Southeast Asia, South Korea and Japan has increased between 10 percent and nearly 30 percent.



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