Tainan Takes Its Tourism Pitch to a Japanese Baseball StadiumA · FULL TRANSLATION
- Tainan's tourism bureau held a Tainan Tourism Day at Belluna Dome.
- It acted as a sponsor of the Saitama Seibu Lions to reach the crowd.
- The aim is to strengthen tourism promotion in the Japanese market.
Local governments promoting tourism in Japan is unremarkable. Choosing a professional baseball stadium is the interesting part. Tainan's tourism bureau ran a Tainan Tourism Day at Belluna Dome as a sponsor of the Saitama Seibu Lions — moving budget away from exhibition booths and onto an existing crowd.
The difference is who you reach. Travel fair visitors already intend to travel abroad, so the competition is other destinations in the same hall. A stadium crowd came for baseball with no destination in mind, so promotion inserts a city into a list it was never on. One fights for ranking; the other builds the list. Japanese baseball audiences are also strongly local and return many times a season, which makes repeat exposure efficient.
What decides the outcome is whether anything catches the interest afterwards: flights, packaged itineraries, lodging tie-ins. Without that, a stadium event is one day of visibility.
Watch booking and flight data after the event, whether the tie-up runs a full season, and whether concrete travel products follow.
On August 14, the Tainan City Government's Tourism Bureau held a "Tainan Tourism Day" at Belluna Dome as a title sponsor of the Saitama Seibu Lions, aiming to strengthen tourism promotion in the Japanese market and deepen Taiwan-Japan tourism exchange. The event was timed to the Lions' game against the Chiba Lotte Marines. Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che travelled to Japan to throw the ceremonial first pitch, appearing alongside Tainan's tourism mascot "Hi-Tau-kun," and the city used baseball's popularity in Japan to introduce Tainan's history, culture, food and urban appeal to fans at the stadium and nationwide.
Huang said Japan is one of Tainan's most important overseas tourism markets. According to Taiwan Tourism Administration statistics, arrivals from Japan to Taiwan topped 1.48 million in 2025, making Japan Taiwan's largest source market. He said the city is deepening ties through city exchanges, air-route cooperation and overseas promotion, and hopes baseball will bring more Japanese visitors to experience the old capital's culture, cuisine and hospitality.
Tourism Bureau Director-General Lin Kuo-hua said the city has made Japan a priority market, combining professional baseball with tourism as a new form of sports-tourism city marketing. Under the theme "For your next trip, come to Taiwan's old capital, Tainan," the event presented school-trip itineraries, Michelin-listed restaurants, recommended walking routes and seasonal fruit in Japanese, and ran a "Tainan Tourism Strike-Out Game" whose participants received original goods including drawstring bags with Tainan window-lattice designs, earphone cases in the local kaachi-bag pattern and limited-edition Tainan baseball pins. Dried fruit, Tainan yi-mian noodles and processed Madou pomelo products were also on display.
The campaign used digital advertising at Seibu Railway's Ikebukuro Station, in-stadium advertising and social media, with an expected reach of about 3 million people. Lin An-ko, a Tainan-born Lions player, and Japanese freelance announcer Ayae Hakamada joined the social media push. The bureau said it will continue promoting two-way tourism exchange with airlines, travel agencies and regional partners.