Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met with İstanbul Mayor Kadir Topbaş in a surprise visit to his office a day before the inauguration ceremony of Marmaray, a giant transportation project connecting İstanbul's Asian and European sides via an undersea commuter train line, on Tuesday Today`s Zaman reported.
Abe arrived in İstanbul on Monday to take part in Marmaray's inauguration, where Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will also be in attendance along with many other top state officials.
The meeting took place at Çıragan Palace, along the Bosporus, and lasted half an hour. The press was allowed to take photos of the Japanese prime minister and İstanbul mayor at the beginning of the meeting, which was closed to the press.
Topbaş said the request for a meeting came from the Japanese prime minister. Underlining that Japan has taken part in many mega projects in Turkey in the past, such as building a bridge over the Bosporus and other rail systems, Topbaş said the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality and Turkey want to advance the level of cooperation between the two countries.
He praised Japan's high technology and experience in mega infrastructure projects and added that Turkey enjoys a partnership with the East Asian country as the booming Turkish economy presents new opportunities for the launch of new mega projects.
The Marmaray project aims to ease İstanbul's heavy traffic and reduce travel time between the two sides of the Bosporus to four minutes. Marmaray, the world's first undersea tunnel connecting two continents, will carry 75,000 passengers per hour and around 1 million passengers per day.