Taiwan's Foreign Ministry is reported today as having received clarification on the comments we reported late last year by Japan's Prime Minister on the Taiwan UN Referendum. According to a wire report repeated on the Taipei Times website:
"Japan has recently explained that it "does not oppose" the plan to hold a referendum on its bid for a seat in the UN under the name Taiwan, but hopes the referendum will not raise tension in the Taiwan Strait, a senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) official said yesterday.
Japan told the ministry that it will not support the planned referendum "if it leads [Taiwan] to take unilateral action to change the `status quo,'" said Huang Ju-hou (黃諸侯), chief executive officer of the MOFA Committee on Japanese Affairs."
Meanwhile the Chinese Nationalist Party, the KMT, Taiwan's largest opposition party has called for a public boycott of the proposed referendum. "Referenda are holy, but this referendum has been distorted and turned into a tool to incite conflicts, so we have made the painful decision to call on voters to reject the UN referendum," KMT chairman Wo Poh-hsiung said.
