Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Dennis Hickey’s piece indicates that he may need to leave Missouri and get a little updating on what has been happening in Taiwan and Asia in the past decades (“ROC is alive and well in Taiwan,” March 21, page 8).

It is questionable that the world will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the revolution that “overthrew the Qing Dynasty and led to the establishment of the Republic of China [ROC].”

Certainly, the 1.3 billion people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will celebrate on Oct. 1 — the anniversary of the PRC’s establishment — rather than the ROC’s Double Ten National Day on Oct. 10.

The cataclysm In Japan has affected the whole of humanity. The devastating impact upon the world’s most densely populated and sophisticated nation, which was the first to experience the atrocities of the atomic bomb, released a deluge of biblical proportion and has stoked fears of doomsday, as if to fulfill popular prophecies — Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, Yisrayl Hawkins, etc.

Reports on this cataclysm are mortifying: the seismic movement along an active fault line and resultant massive earthquake; the significant upsurge of the sea floor, creating tsunami waves both directly submerging the coastal plains of northeastern Honshu and traveling across the Pacific Ocean as far as California’s coastline; the total destruction of agricultural land and towns; the danger of nuclear reactors and their deadly failures; the spread of lethal radiation; snow and ice; hunger and privation; the blackouts in Tokyo’s 35 million metropolis; the chaos; the worldwide shock; the exodus.