Tokyo Taiwan Radar is dedicated to collecting every Taiwan-related signal across Japan, deepening mutual understanding between Taiwan and Japan, and fostering exchange of cultural, social, and economic experience. If you have any suggestions about event listings or data errors, or would like to request a specific feature or discuss a collaboration, feel free to email us at hello@tokyotaiwanradar.com.
Taiwan's fruits, like its semiconductors, are the very essence of high technology! That is precisely why Tokyo Taiwan Radar chose the wax apple (lianbu) as its mascot. Taiwan's wax apple cannot be grown in northern China, Japan, or Korea, and it differs even from the native varieties of its Indonesian homeland. During the Age of Exploration in the 16th century, the Dutch brought the ancestor of the wax apple from Southeast Asia. Its name, too, shifted from the Malay 'Jambu' into Taiwanese, eventually settling into the beautiful Chinese characters it bears today. More importantly, until the end of World War II, the wax apple was not a fruit ordinary Taiwanese people ate. Only after agricultural improvements in the 1980s and 1990s did it acquire its present sweetness and size. Like Taiwan itself, the wax apple became what it is today through a tangle of diverse histories and countless transformations. It reveals to us the complexity of culture, and guides us as we scan the future.
We currently monitor 100+ sources automatically, including official organiser websites, ticketing platforms (Peatix, Eventbrite), arthouse cinema sites, government cultural institutions (Taiwan Cultural Centre, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office), academic institutions (Waseda, U-Tokyo, Kyoto U), and news outlets (NHK, PRTimes, Walker+). Full list available on the sources page。
This site runs daily at 09:00 JST via GitHub Actions, with scraping, GPT-4o-mini translation, and categorisation feeding into a Supabase database. The frontend is built on Next.js 16 with Tailwind CSS and deployed on Vercel. Source code is open on GitHub: TuiTuiKoan/Tokyo_Taiwan_Radar。