Taipei’s MRT stations add Japanese language

Traffic drives along a road as a MRT train, operated by Taipei Rapid Transit, travels overhead

Taipei MRT stations have begun to broadcast instructions in Japanese, an addition to Mandarin, English, the Taiwanese dialect and Hakka.

The Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation announced that Japanese will be added on the Taipei metro with a trial period at 13 stations near tourist hotspots, where passengers take elevators, escalators and trains.

Forty-seven percent of the 3.47 million Asian tourists that visit Taiwan each year come from Japan.

The next largest group of tourists come from Southeast Asia, at 14 percent, followed by Hong Kong and Macau at 11 percent, and South Korea at 8 percent.

Taiwan’s latest visitor statistics showed that there had been a decrease in the number of tourist arrivals from Hong Kong and Macau in May, which was down by 4.33 percent.

Currently, the Taipei Metro website provides information in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, while its MRT station ticket machines provide services in 11 languages, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, German, French, and Spanish.

Netizens on the popular Taiwanese online forum PTT were supportive about the news, yet others complained that having five languages made the announcements drag on for too long, as cited in Taiwan News.