Tokai’s JCI members talked with officials of Taipei’s Department of Information and Tourism regarding details of the three-legged race Monday, according to Chiu Peng-hsin, deputy director of the department.

It was decided during the talks that 300 pairs would participate in the race to be held at a riverside park in Songshan District on June 5, according to Chiu.

The current world record for the number of participants in a three-legged race is 80 pairs, set in Hong Kong on Jan. 10, 2009.

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday touted the country’s close ties trade and tourism with Japan and said he expected the new Association of East Asian Relations (AEAR) chairman to help promote stronger bilateral relations.

At a meeting with an economic group from Japan’s Fukui Prefecture, Ma cited the number of Japanese tourists who visited Taiwan last year, which reached 1.29 million, and said the growing number of tourists showed the continued development of Taiwan-Japan relations.

The appointment of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) secretary-general Liao Liou-yi (廖了以) as head of the AEAR should help boost relations between the two nations, Ma said.

“Taiwan and Japan do not have formal diplomatic ties, but the two countries share a special partnership because of close non-official ties in trade, tourism and transportation,” Ma said at the Presidential Office.

The AEAR is a major platform that handles bilateral relations between Taipei and Tokyo after diplomatic ties between the two countries was severed in 1972.

Liao, who has also served as Presidential Office secretary-general and interior minister, has a unique familiarity with Japanese affairs because his mother is Japanese, Ma said.

Ma said as Taiwan’s second-largest trading partner, Japan invested more than US$400 million in Taiwan last year, while Taiwan’s investment in Japan reached US$250 million during the same period, helping bring the total investment between the two countries to NT$70 billion (US$2.4 billion).

Last year, Taipei and Tokyo signed an investment pact after more than 12 months of negotiations. Ma described the pact as the most important economic agreement between the two countries in 60 years.

“We also signed an open-skies agreement with Japan last year, which promotes air transportation between the two countries,” Ma said. “We expect the bilateral relations to continue to grow.”

Starting from 6pm on 13 February until 11pm on 17 February, travellers can enjoy up to 50% discount when booking hotels in Japan during 101-hour sale through Hotels.com or through the Hotels.com reservations hotline: 2840-0896 (Cantonese) or 2840-0899 (English).

Below are some of the deals highlights:

The Prince Park Tower Tokyo —4.5*
Rising above the green grounds of Shiba Park, travellers can overlook the wonderful view of Tokyo from The Prince Park Tower Tokyo. Nearby are the world-famous Tokyo Tower and Zojo-ji Temple. In addition to sightseeing, travellers can also enjoy the excellent spa treatments offered by the Hotel.

Rooms start at HK$1,276# per room per night, down from the original HK$2,550#. Travellers enjoy a 50% discount. Savings are valid for those travelling between 14 Feb and 30 Aug 2012.

Hotel Granvia Kyoto —4.5*
This modern hotel is part of the Kyoto Station complex which features the Isetan department store, the Kyoto Theater, a museum and Kyoto Tower. There are more than 1,000 special art pieces displayed in the Hotel which most of them are created by Kyoto artists.

Rooms start at HK$1,114# per room per night, down from the original HK$1,856#. Travellers enjoy a 40% discount. Savings are valid for those travelling between 14 Feb and 31 Mar 2012.

Hotel Monterey Grasmere Osaka —3.5*
The fashionably designed Hotel Monterey Grasmere Osaka opened its door just a few years ago. Conveniently situated near Namba station, the hotel is close to Osaka Castle, Shinsaibashi Shopping Arcade, Tsutenkaku Tower and Shitennoji Temple.
Rooms start at HK$764# per room per night, down from the original HK$1,523#. Travellers enjoy a 50% discount.

Century Royal Hotel —4*
Situated in Sapporo city center, Century Royal Hotel is close to Sapporo JR Tower, Former Hokkaido Government Office Building, Clock Tower., Odori Park and Sapporo TV Tower. The Hotel offers a variety of authentic Japanese cuisine for travellers to experience Japanese food culture.

Rooms start at HK$1,216# per room per night, down from the original HK$2,434#. Travellers enjoy a 50% discount.

# Savings are valid for bookings made between 6pm on 13 February and 11pm on 17 February for travelling from 14 February to 30 June 2012, unless otherwise specified. Prices are per room per night and not include all fees and taxes.

Conditions apply. Please see specific details for each hotel listed by clicking at the hotel of your interest. Search with your preferred dates for travel to see the discounted rates for your stay.

But two countries where tourism is a big business are facing big troubles.

In Egypt, tourism has stopped, sputtered and stalled again. After President Hosni Mubarak was toppled last year, it looked like tourism would rebound. With violence in the run-up to elections, things have yet to normalize in the land of the pyramids.

Japan is nearing the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that also led to a major nuclear incident. Coupled with a spike in the yen exchange rates, the nation is fighting a two-front battle to bring back visitors.

EGYPT: Paying a high price for reforms

Of the two nations, Egypt is in worse shape. After Mubarak was forced out, there was hope that Egypt’s $12.5 billion tourism industry could get back to business. Tour groups and cruise lines had stayed away during the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, next door to the Egyptian Museum. With Mubarak gone, visitors would not only be able to see the treasures of antiquity along the Nile, but also support the Arab Spring that was bringing reform to the region.

It didn’t work out that way. After an initial lull, factional fighting has erupted amid a sometimes bloody army crackdown. Elections likely will bring an Islamist coalition into power — if the army lets it — but how radical the politics of the new leaders will be is still up in the air.

Egypt has paid a heavy price, with the Agence France-Presse news agency reporting that tourism had dropped 30 percent in 2011, and those who were coming were staying for shorter periods and spending less.

In Egypt, the goals of politics and tourism often are at odds. To get Western visitors to return, the country first must calm its streets. But if the calming brings an Islamic-led government that moves one of the Arab world’s most secularized societies to something more conservative, that also could scare off visitors.

Egypt has a long way to go to get visitors back. Luckily for the country, its treasures have proved an irresistible lure in hard times before: After the killing of 62 people, mainly tourists, at the Deir el-Bahari temple complex near Luxor in 1997, and the general unease over travel to the region after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

JAPAN: Facing a double whammy

Japan is an underrated vacation spot, a country that mixes the ancient with ultramodern, Kabuki with J-pop.

However, Japan is facing a double whammy in its effort to bring Western tourists back after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. The lasting damage of “3/11″ is the ongoing containment and cleanup of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. It has the unenviable reputation of being the site of the second-worst nuclear reactor incident in history, after the 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl in the then-Soviet Union.

Though Tokyo is 140 miles away, every report of a trace of radiation resonates in the capital. Western tourism has dropped sharply, even to the ancient city of Kyoto, which is 400 miles from the reactor site.

The Japanese have come up with all kinds of schemes to try to lure tourists back, including a plan to pay for 1,000 American bloggers to come to the country and write glowing reports.

Major League Baseball is helping by scheduling a two-game regular season-opening series in late March at the Tokyo Dome. The games between the Oakland A’s and Seattle Mariners will be shown in the United States. The message: If the Japanese capital is safe for millionaire athletes, it’s safe for the rest of us.

Even if Japan can get tourists to put the radiation issue in the back of their minds, the country has become increasingly expensive to visit in the aftermath of the crisis.

Fuel surcharges on Japanese airlines pushed fares to about $1,100 round trip in coach during peak periods. More importantly — and this is the real killer for visitation — the yen is at an all-time high of about 75 to the dollar. That pushes prices up at hotels and restaurants at a time when the wobbly euro is making Europe more attractive to vacationers.

While the radiation issue is the more serious and long-term for Japan, getting its currency exchange rate under control is going to be the first step toward any tourism recovery.

In both Egypt and Japan, the year may depend on how well they “get the lid on,” though it has different meanings in each place. In Egypt, it means finding stability and safety for visitors. In Japan, it’s convincing tourists, as well as international visitors, that Fukushima’s fallout — literal and figurative — can be contained.

In December, the number of Chinese visitors rose 32% from a year earlier to a record 80,000, following a similar increase in November. Anecdotal evidence suggests another surge in January.

Midmorning one day last week, tour buses catering to Chinese visitors lined the main thoroughfare of Akihabara, a Tokyo neighborhood known for high-tech shops and Japanese subculture like animé. Akky One, an electronics chain in the district, moved all its sales staff, including 50 or so Chinese speakers, to its duty-free shop, and temporarily suspended morning hours at its two other stores in Akihabara that cater mostly to Japanese clients.

The shoppers were a diverse group made up of families with children, young couples and corporate groups, many traveling abroad for the first time. Among them was Liu Gai Hong, a 67-year-old retired accountant from Shandong province who came on a six-day tour with her son, a government employee, and his two school-age children. Her purchase: a ¥26,000 ($339) JVC video camera in blue that she planned to use for activities at her seniors’ group. “They sell these things in China as well, but the absolute best are only available in Japan,” she said, smiling.

Across the street at Laox, another electronics store, the best-selling items included a ¥54,800 rice cooker featuring an inner pot coated with diamond and silver powder for better heat conductivity. Tomohiko Okano, the store manager, says Chinese customers on average spend ¥70,000 per person. “They are very brand-conscious. They want items made in Japan,” he says. How about Westerners? “They buy T-shirts. Their average is far less than ¥10,000.”

The recovery in Chinese tourism, which started around September, serves as a reminder of how Japan relies on China’s powerful economic growth to prop up its own economy ailing from a long malaise and a shrinking and aging population. China is now by far Japan’s largest trading partner, and its direct investments in Japan have grown sharply in recent years, albeit from low levels. The rebound in Chinese tourism stands out as the number of visitors from other nations like the U.S. and South Korea remains below pre-March 11 levels.

The Japanese government has actively sought Chinese tourists in recent years, easing visa requirements in order to expand such travel. Expectations for growth are huge. As part of Tokyo’s long-term economic growth strategy, Japan hopes to increase the number of foreign visitors to the nation to 20 million by 2020 and counts on Chinese visitors to make up six million of the total. The number of visitors to Japan fell 28% to 6.21 million last year, the lowest level since 2003, due to the nuclear accident and the sharp increase in the value of the yen against the U.S. dollar and other currencies, making Japan an increasingly expensive place to travel. The number from China tumbled 26% for the full year to 1.4 million, though it was still nearly twice the level of five years ago.

“In this tough global economic environment, growth industries are hard to find. Chinese tourism is among the very few promising ones, and we need to promote it seriously,” said Daisuke Tsubokura, a researcher at the government-run Development Bank of Japan. Japan’s second-largest city, Osaka, for example, is projected to see its population decline by 280,000 by 2020, and is bracing for a corresponding drop in consumption. Growth in tourism, however, could add $2.5 billion to the area’s annual personal consumption. “An increase in Chinese tourists could make up for up to 60% of the lost consumption,” Mr. Tsubokura said.

Tourism industry executives say there has periodically been friction with Chinese visitors, including complaints from Japanese hotel guests troubled by large and lively groups of Chinese tourists crowding restaurants and karaoke rooms. Oedo Onsen Monogatari, a hot spring resort in Tokyo, has received complaints from Japanese customers about visitors brushing teeth and dipping used wash cloths in the public baths.

Still, Oedo is stepping up efforts to boost revenue from Chinese tourism, sending marketing officers to major Chinese cities and stuffing its gift shops with items popular with Chinese tourists. Such efforts have paid off. Since the beginning of the Lunar New Year holiday, the number of daily visitors to the spa has risen to about 1,700, compared with 1,300 normally.

“After the [March] disaster, we couldn’t imagine business would recover so quickly,” said Ritsuko Furuyama, assistant manager of Oedo Onsen. “Now we are worried what happens in February after they leave.”

The brainchild of a travel agency in Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture, the Project recruited two Britons who had never before set foot in Japan to travel the country’s 47 prefectures in 100 days, posting daily blogs from the road.

Its goal? To tell the world that Japan is as safe and fascinating as it ever was, regardless of the awful events of March 11 last year.

Of the 1,897 applicants from 85 different countries, photographer Katy Morrison and writer Jamie Lafferty were chosen to undertake the mission.

The couple embarked on their journey on September 15 from Kanazawa Station, returning there to complete the circuit on December 23, just two days before Christmas.

Magellan Resorts & Trust and its Real Japan-branded travel agency in Kanazawa was behind the road trip of a lifetime.

The company began offering domestic tours for overseas customers (“inbound tours”) five years ago. Just when its inbound operations finally stabilized last year, March 11 saw one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded hit the northeast of Japan.

News channels showered the world with continuous footage of the tsunami generated by the Great East Japan Earthquake and reports on the Fukushima nuclear accident. Many believed all of Japan to be in a state of disaster and foreign tourists essentially stopped coming.

When his staff suggested the Travel Volunteer Project, Magellan president Hiroshi Kuchiki didn’t take long to approve it. “I felt we needed to do something bold like this to draw people’s attention,” he tells us. “Otherwise, nothing would change.”

Once word of the Project got out, far more people applied than expected.

Aya Kihara, supervisor of inbound operations, explains: “We didn’t know what the response would be. We were surprised by the number of people who applied and reassured that Japan had not been abandoned as a tourist destination.”

After a rigorous selection process, the two winners were announced in September 2011 and the journey began — including the unenviable task of getting the logistics in place.

Seeking support

“When we launched this scheme, we went to the Japan Tourism Agency for some support, but they had no interest or even saw the point of the Project and rejected it,” says Kihara.

“Then we went to METI — Japan’s trade and economy ministry — which at least thanked us for taking such an initiative to bring tourism back.

“They supported the Project (unfortunately not financially), so it at least that helped us talk to potential sponsors.”

In other words, the Project was tough going from the very beginning, before the first blog post, tweet or press story aiming to remind the world what an alluring tourist destination Japan remains.

“Of course, some places helped us the very day we opened our site and interpreter supporters also gave us their individual assistance, but it’s hard to put into words how we felt about the difference in the degrees of support people showed,” says Kihara.

Yet, the situation had changed for the better by the end of the marathon trip.

Two years after filing for bankruptcy, the airline – one of Japan’s most famous brands – has radically reformed its operations, is generating healthy profits and appears on course for a public offering and re-listing later this year.

That makes JAL an inspiring example for anyone involved in such current corporate car crashes as Olympus, the optical equipment maker mired in a Y100bn accounting scandal, or Tokyo Electric Power, the utility laid low by the failure of its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

A successful public offering, which some media have suggested could be worth more than Y500bn, would also mark a rare policy win for Japan’s ruling Democratic party, which has struggled to make a mark since its historic general election victory in 2009.

It was a then-novice DPJ minister who finally called a halt to government-organised JAL bail-outs, the favoured response of the former ruling Liberal Democratic party to the carriers’ chronic problems. The resulting bankruptcy was Japan’s biggest ever corporate failure outside the financial sector.

Now, the government can reasonably expect that the state-backed Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corporation, which invested Y350bn in JAL to fund its revival plan, will be able to cash out in decent shape.

It was also the DPJ administration that turned to Kazuo Inamori, a supporter of the party and the revered founder of the Kyocera technology group, to lead the airline back to health.

Mr Inamori, 79, is not only the author of philosophically minded management books such as “How to Live” and “How to Work”, he is also an ordained Zen priest. At JAL he has shown the value of clear, decisive command for a once-proud company long buried in bureaucracy and vested interest.

This has involved some tough talk. In 2010, he suggested that JAL managers were not up to the job of “managing a grocery store”. Last year he issued a pre-emptive warning to the government not to try to force the airline to resume unprofitable but politically useful routes. ‘’We’re not qualified as real business managers unless we can say ‘no’ to those in power,’’ Mr Inamori declared.

Alongside this campaign of what the veteran boss has rather scarily described as “consciousness reform” was a sweeping restructuring. Since early 2009, JAL has cut employee numbers from 48,000 to slightly over 30,000 and suspended operations on a host of routes including flights to international destinations such as Rome and Amsterdam.

More than 100 aircraft have been withdrawn from service, including JAL’s beloved fleet of Boeing 747s, and the types of airliners it operates has been reduced from 7 to 4. The corporate structure has been simplified and scores of non-core businesses disposed of.

Such efforts are already bearing fruit. Despite the lingering impact of last year’s tsunami and nuclear crisis – which caused massive domestic economic disruption and slashed international visitor numbers – JAL is back in the black. The carrier reported net profits of Y97bn for the six months to September, four times those of closest domestic rival, All Nippon Airways.

In November the company said that for the year to March 2012, it expected net profits of Y120bn, nearly twice its previous forecast.

Though smaller than before bankruptcy, JAL is far fitter, says Peter Harbison, chairman of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, an industry consultancy that gave the carrier its “airline of the year” award in October.

“Before it was like an old ship with 100 years of barnacles on it,” Mr Harbison says. “It’s been transformed.”

The new JAL should be well placed to tap into opportunities thrown up by the rapid regional growth and the opening of routes to destinations in China and South Korea.

Still, anaemic economic growth and demographic decline means Japan’s domestic market will remain tough, and JAL is likely to face increasing competition from low-cost carriers amid domestic market liberalisation.

To ensure it is not left out of the low-cost market, JAL plans to this year establish a budget airline called Jetstar Japan in partnership with Australia’s Qantas and Mitsubishi Corp, the trading house.

Still, optimism about JAL should not go untempered. Its revival could still be held hostage to high energy prices and economic woes in the eurozone and elsewhere that could easily threaten Japan’s fragile recovery.

Would-be subscribers to JAL’s proposed share offer should remember that, as Mr Harbison says, long-term investment in airlines is usually a mug’s game.

Flying remains a brutal business. Trans World Airlines in the US showed carriers can go bust more than once. Just last November, AMR Corp – the parent company of JAL’s US partner American Airlines – filed for bankruptcy.

JAL may now be flying high but investors should keep their feet, and their funds, firmly on the ground.

“We doubt tourism would increase,” MOF said. “It’s just throwing money away.”

The Japanese edition of the Wall Street Journal said, “The possibility of many foreigners visiting Japan has disappeared as nothing more than a dream.”

JTA’s plan was to give away free airplane tickets to Japan to foreigners. These foreigners would be so impressed that they would return to their home countries and burn up the blogs and social media with glowing stories about a safe Japan. Then Japanese tourism, heavily in the doldrums since the tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima — would magically recover.

The JTA calculated the cost of the tickets to be around nine million dollars. In defense of their plan, a JTA spokesman said, “The direct economic benefits of having 10,000 foreigners visit Japan would roughly be in the 10 million dollar range, with indirect economic benefits running in the range of around 27 million dollars.”

Given the price of many hotels in Tokyo, an estimate that foreigners would spend around $1,000 each during the course of their stay in Japan (assuming a week’s stay) is conservative, if not outright modest.

After the MOF rejected the project, the JTA said, “It’s regrettable that high expectations among foreigners have been disappointed.”

However, according to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, the JTA may have a Plan B in reserve: to spend approximately 5 million dollars to invite foreigners to visit the Tohoku (northeast) and northern Kanto areas, roughly defined as Saitama, Tochigi, and Fukushima prefectures.

Then the foreigners could still blog and use social media to say that Japan was safe, setting off a wave of foreign tourism to the Tohoku region.

That includes the folks who work in tourism. The Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) says foreign visits dropped 73% in the days after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. But with time, and thanks to a Herculean effort to salvage a $19.4 billion (CAD) industry, travelers are returning. As of October, visits were only down about 15% overall.

“It is recovering rather quickly,” says the JNTO’s Manoru Kobori. “Probably by the springtime when we see the cherry blossoms in full bloom we will see almost the same level as the year before (2010).”

If you’re considering a trip to Japan, here are some ideas you might want to add to your itinerary.

TOKYO This is a city of neighbourhoods and parks. Set aside time to walk the small side streets of Ebisu, Daikanyama, Omotesando, Shimokitazawa, and Koenji. You’ll stumble upon small cafés, standing bars, boutiques, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. If you’re in the city in April, stroll along the river in Nakameguro to see the cherry trees in all their glory. Take a break from pounding the pavement in these great green spaces: Yoyogi Park, Ueno Park, Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, Happo-en.

KAMAKURA Once the de-facto capital of Japan (1192-1333), Kamakura now is a laid-back beach town. An hour’s train ride from Tokyo, go during the week to avoid the crowds. Start with breakfast by the sea at bills restaurant in the Shichirigahama neighbourhood. Then go for a stroll on the sand and watch the surfers ply the waves. After that, see the sights, including the Hasedera Temple, the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine, and the Great Buddha.

KYOTO Many of this city’s temples and shrines are listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. But take time to visit some of the smaller places of worship, such as the tiny Daihikaku Sensoji Temple, which is perched on a hill in the western Arashiyama district. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. And why just visit a temple when you can stay in one? The Shunkoin Temple offers rooms with private bathrooms and a shared kitchen. Email Reverend Taka Kawakami to make a reservation.

KARUIZAWA Generations have been coming to this town, located in the foothills of the Japanese Alps, to enjoy hot spring resorts (onsen), the colours of fall, and the cool of summer. Karuizawa is a one-hour high-speed train journey from Tokyo. The old Mampei Hotel, where John and Yoko once stayed, is still open. A modern-meets-traditional resort worth seeing is Hoshinoya Karuizawa, with its public-access onsen and riverside shopping and restaurant village.

IZU PENINSULA The perfect weekend getaway. In summer and early fall, Tokyoites enjoy its beaches, the best outside of Okinawa. Shimoda is one town worth checking out. Consider staying at White Beach Hotel, a place with functional rooms, a fun atmosphere, and good food (plus it’s 30 seconds from Ohama beach).

YAMANASHI PREFECTURE If you’re looking for a good day trip from Tokyo, head to this prefecture, Japan’s version of the Napa Valley. Yes, Japan makes its own wine with domestically grown grapes, and while it’s not yet on par with New Zealand or California, it’s getting there. Go to the Budo no Oka Center (Grape Hill Center), where for $14.50 CAD you can sample from hundreds of bottles in the “tasting cave.” Once your thirst has been quenched, head upstairs and have a barbeque on the terrace, with a view of the surrounding hills and vineyards.

TOHOKU Hoping to give back while you’re in Japan? Get in touch with the non-profit organizations that are doing good deeds in the devastated Tohoku region. Christine Lavoie-Gagnon, a Quebecer and long-time resident of Japan, started an international group called NADIA in the days after the disaster. She and her volunteers have been cleaning and fixing up homes in the city of Ishinomaki. Register for trips on their website.