China Festival 2024 kicks off in Tokyo

TOKYO, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) — China Festival 2024 kicked off in Yoyogi Park in downtown Tokyo on Saturday, with some 150 booths set up on site to showcase the vitality of China’s booming economy.
The two-day event, co-sponsored by the Chinese embassy in Japan and the Executive Committee of China Festival 2024, features food tasting, tourism promotion, and cultural displays such as erhu performances, acrobatic shows and popular animation. Visitors can also experience the new energy vehicles, smartphones and other “intelligent manufacturing in China.”
Japanese Former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in his speech at the opening ceremony that this year’s China Festival has Shandong, Hunan, Qinghai and other Chinese provinces participating in the exhibition, fully demonstrating the charm of Chinese local culture.
Fukuda, also the top advisor of the Executive Committee of China Festival 2023, said China is developing rapidly and expressed hopes that more Japanese people will have the opportunity to visit China and experience the current China for themselves. He looks forward to both sides jointly promoting people-to-people friendship through enhanced personnel exchanges.
Chinese Ambassador to Japan Wu Jianghao said that this year’s event is unprecedented in scale, aiming to fully display the excellent traditional Chinese culture and the achievements of Chinese modernization, so that everyone can understand contemporary China through close experience.
We hope that the China Festival will serve as a bridge to encourage more Japanese people to visit China and experience the real and vivid China, Wu added.
Tokyo resident Junko Toya has taken her daughter on about 20 trips to China. At this year’s event, she tasted steamed dumplings and experienced Chinese ink painting. “I haven’t been to China for a long time, and I missed China very much this time when I participated in the China Festival. My child said that she tasted the Chinese flavors in her childhood memories again,” she said. ■