Kaohsiung, May 17 (CNA) The Kaohsiung City Tourism Bureau and its Japanese counterpart from Sapporo City in Hokkaido have renewed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) they signed in 2017 aimed at boosting bilateral interactions in tourism and other areas, the southern Taiwan city said Wednesday.
In a statement, the Kaohsiung bureau said the renewed MOU with the Sapporo City Economic and Tourism Affairs Bureau was signed on March 16, with both sides committing to engage in exchanges and cooperation in areas including sports, environment issues and transportation.
They will also jointly promote the development of businesses related to tourism and travel in the two cities and boost friendship between Taiwan and Japan, the city bureau said.
In addition, the two bureaus will continue to talk with airline companies and tour operators in the two cities about resumption of direct flights between Kaohsiung and Sapporo, the bureau said.
Japan has been among the top three countries of origin for travelers to Kaohsiung, and 28,000 of the 140,000 Japanese travelers to Taiwan during the first three months of this year visited and stayed in the southern Taiwan port city, the bureau said.
Direct flights between Kaohsiung International Airport and Sapporo New Chitose Airport were suspended in March 2020 amid the global spread of COVID-19 and tightened border controls introduced at that time.
In 2022, Taiwan began phasing out border control measures used to combat the spread of COVID-19, and local carriers China Airlines, EVA Airways and Tigerair Taiwan currently operate a total of 41 round-trip flights per week between Kaohsiung and five destinations in Japan -- Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Nagoya and Ibaraki, the bureau said.
Kaohsiung and Sapporo signed a three-year MOU on tourism and exchanges in other areas in 2017, but negotiations on a new MOU were stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The MOU signed in March does not specify the duration of the agreement nor an expiry date to avoid the need for talks on renewing the deal in the future, according to the Kaohsiung bureau.
Bureau chief Minlin Kao (高閔琳) on Wednesday highlighted the two cities' vastly different weather and scenery, suggesting that people in Kaohsiung could visit Sapporo in the summer for its cooler climate, and residents in the Japanese city might travel to Kaohsiung for the tropical weather during the winter.
