Nagasaki's ceremony marking the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing was supposed to be a solemn tribute to the war dead and a call for peace. Instead, the August 9 event turned into a diplomatic flap after Taiwan's top representative in Japan, Li Yi-yang (李逸洋), spent several days publicly protesting the seating his delegation had been given, issuing press releases to both Japanese and Taiwanese media accusing the Nagasaki city government of taking a "pro China" stance. Nagasaki Mayor Suzuki Shiro pushed back the next day, saying Taiwan had never actually been on the city's official invitation list to begin with. It was Taiwan that asked to attend, he said, and the city agreed, following the same arrangement it used in 2025, to seat a Taiwanese representative in an "overseas guest" section placed behind the ambassadors of other countries.
The episode kept escalating. When Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) faced questions about it from opposition lawmakers at a legislative hearing on August 19, his answer notably diverged from Li's public framing, and appeared aimed squarely at his own envoy. "Taiwan's situation is inherently a special one," Lin said. "Sometimes we need to adapt to circumstances and encourage things to move in a positive direction, rather than simply asserting our position." According to people familiar with the matter, senior Taiwanese officials were unsettled by how Li had handled the dispute, and the discomfort did not stop there: contacts in Japanese political circles reportedly reached out through back channels to convey their own confusion to officials in Taipei.
A Deal Was Already Made Behind The Scenes
Sources familiar with the planning say Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs already understood, well before the ceremony, that Nagasaki would not extend Taiwan's delegation the same treatment Hiroshima does, and had never intended to send Li himself from Tokyo. Instead, the ministry had settled on having Chen Ming-chun (陳銘俊), head of Taiwan's Fukuoka office, which covers Kyushu affairs, attend the Nagasaki ceremony on the ground, while Li would represent Taiwan at Hiroshima's own memorial on August 6. Both men, sources say, had already been briefed on that division of labor. Li's sudden public broadside therefore blindsided a ministry that thought the matter had been settled.
In his posts, Li said he and two deputy representatives stayed away from the Nagasaki ceremony because the city had denied Taiwan's national status and dignity by placing its delegation's seats outside the section reserved for foreign missions, and that Taiwan had responded by sending a lower ranking official, Chen, in protest. He described Nagasaki's decision as bowing to Chinese pressure and serving Beijing's legal campaign against Taiwan, then kept posting for several more days, at one point claiming that more than 80 percent of the reaction on social media backed his stance.
Nagasaki's Long And Complicated Ties To China
Part of the story lies in geography and history. Nagasaki sits on Kyushu, facing China across the water, and was the only port the shogunate kept open to Chinese trade during Japan's centuries of self-imposed isolation, a legacy still visible in local dishes with Chinese roots. China maintains a consulate general in the city today. A veteran Taiwanese diplomat familiar with Japan affairs said relations between Taipei and Nagasaki have warmed only gradually given how much longer and deeper the city's ties to China run.
That contrasts with Hiroshima, which began proactively inviting Taiwan to its own memorial in 2025, sending the invitation directly to Taiwan's representative office in Tokyo. Nagasaki's inclusion of a Taiwanese envoy that same year came only after Taipei itself asked to attend. Even then, Li, who attended in person in 2025, had already voiced frustration over what he called Taiwan being treated as lesser, though at the time he pinned the blame on Chinese pressure rather than on Nagasaki's government directly. Ahead of this year's ceremony, Taiwan's Fukuoka office had been coordinating with Nagasaki's deputy mayor and came away believing the city was acting in good faith, even as Li in Tokyo held a different view. Once Taipei finalized the division of labor between Li and Chen, a person familiar with the exchange said, both men understood the plan, which is what made Li's outburst so unexpected.
The Foreign Ministry's own statement, issued the evening Li's post went up, tried to lower the temperature. It voiced regret over shortcomings in the arrangement and acknowledged the pressure Chinese diplomacy places on Nagasaki, but also pointed out that Taiwan's seats in 2026 were placed directly adjacent to, not separated from, the section for foreign missions, that Taiwan's delegates wore the same lapel flowers as other nations' envoys and mingled naturally with Japanese officials and other delegations at the venue, and that the arrangement marked "an improvement over last year."
A Pattern Of Social Media Missteps
Li, a former journalist who went on to serve as vice president of the Examination Yuan, interior minister and secretary general of the Presidential Office, was named Taiwan's representative to Japan by President Lai Ching-te in August 2024, one of Lai's first ambassadorial appointments to a key partner. Because a representative's public conduct in Japan is widely read as reflecting the president's own posture, the episode carries weight well beyond a single seating dispute.
Li arrived in Tokyo without the fluent Japanese of his predecessor, Frank Hsieh, who studied in Japan and speaks the language easily; Li has instead relied on memorization and coaching from an adviser at the office, and takes evident pride in delivering remarks in Japanese without notes. This is not the first time his social media habits have stirred controversy inside diplomatic circles. In May 2026 he posted photos of a dinner he hosted for several Japanese lawmakers, writing that the representative office had "long neglected" the relationship, a line some read as an implicit swipe at Hsieh. A former lawmaker aligned with Hsieh publicly shot back that Li understood neither diplomacy nor Japanese well enough to make that claim.
Hsieh himself, speaking in March 2025 at the launch of his memoir about his eight years in the post, said the hardest part of the job was managing Taiwan and Japan's many unresolved historical disputes while still needing Tokyo's goodwill on issue after issue. He said he protested when protest was warranted, but never through press releases or press conferences, because that approach might win applause at home while failing diplomatically. Lee Da-wei, a career diplomat and former secretary general of the Presidential Office, wrote in his own memoir that then President Tsai Ing-wen would sometimes warn officials known for posting impulsively on social media to "manage your tweets," a caution he said applies with particular force in the national security arena, where every word is parsed for its downstream effects. One person familiar with the situation said Li's posts are, at times, simply erratic, and there is no realistic way for aides to review each one before it goes up. Whether Li can live up to Lin's stated hope that he build on the foundation Hsieh left behind may depend less on his Japanese and more on pausing to weigh the consequences before he hits publish. （Related： Lai Ching-te Honors Abe’s Legacy: Taiwan-Japan Security Ties Vital for Indo-Pacific Stability ｜ Latest ）
