Taiwan love story conjures colonial nostalgia

TAIPEI (Kyodo) A Taiwanese movie depicting a love story between a Japanese woman and a Taiwanese man has become a huge blockbuster on the island, setting box-office records since its release at the end of August.

From here to eternity: A couple embrace in a scene from the movie "Cape No. 7," which has been drawing huge crowds in Taiwan since its release in August. COURTESY OF CAPE NO. 7

"Cape No. 7," which cost just 50 million Taiwanese dollars to make, but has so far generated T$400 million, or about ¥1.2 billion.

The actors and actresses featured in the movie have all become stars in Taiwan, and spinoff goods are selling well.

Even Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou highly praised the film.

"(The movie) has given dreams to Taiwanese people," he said.

The story centers on seven love letters written by a male Japanese teacher who left Taiwan after World War II and the end of Japan's colonial rule of Taiwan.

The letters were written to a Taiwanese woman living in a town on the coast of southern Taiwan.

Sixty years later, a group of Taiwanese boys and a Japanese girl discover the letters and try to deliver them to the woman addressed in the letters.

The movie is almost entirely in Japanese and the local Taiwanese language, rather than Chinese Mandarin, which is officially used in Taiwan.

Chinese Mandarin was introduced to Taiwan by Chinese mainlanders who emigrated to the island together with the Kuomintang government in the late 1940s.

Critics lay the movie's popularity to nostalgia for the period of Japanese colonial rule and frustration over the Nationalist Party government, now led by Ma.

But director Wei Te-sheng denies that the screenplay is politically motivated.

"The message I intended to send in the movie is that people should not forget to accept the other as they are and set aside political confrontation," Wei said.

Whether the film will be released in Japan has yet to be decided, but the director said he would like as many Japanese as possible to see it.