羽鳥醫院

Hatori Hospital

June 22nd, 2026

A neatly restored Japanese colonial era building on Huagang Street (花崗街) in Hualien City. It was originally Hatori Hospital (羽鳥醫院), the medical practice of Japanese physician Hatori Jūrō (羽鳥重郎), established in 1931. Hatori had already spent decades studying tropical disease for the colonial Governor-General’s health bureau in Taiwan and is credited with identifying a local disease outbreak as Taiwan’s strain of mite-borne scrub typhus in 1914. Hatori returned to Japan with his family in 1945, his infant grandson among them, and the building gradually fell into disrepair in the post-war era.

Around 2013 the derelict, badly leaning house was bought by Lai Qiushu (賴秋淑) and her physician husband, who spent more a small fortune restoring it with traditional methods, jacking the structure upright, swapping out its columns one at a time, and stripping the floor and ceiling to guard against dampness and termite damage before reopening the space as Qiu Chao Café (秋朝咖啡館). In 2016 the grandson, Hatori Shigeaki (羽鳥重明), by then a gastroenterologist in his seventies, travelled from Japan to see his grandfather’s former clinic.