Despite Taiwan being the nation that donated the most amount of money to Japan in response to the earthquake, the government didn't publicly thank Taiwan along with other nations. The Japanese government placed ads in multiple nations to show gratitude of the donations, but not Taiwan. This prompted Japanese citizens to thank Taiwan individually. Japanese designer Maiko Kissaka started a fundraiser on April 19, 2020 in an attempt to place ads on two newspapers to show gratitude to the Taiwanese people for donations. This started a series of attempts from individuals and organizations to thank Taiwan for the donations across the next few years. A notable organization named Arigatou Taiwan was created for the sole purpose of thanking Taiwan and planned to hold an event each year starting on 2012, and managed to include several earthquake survivors at the event in 2015. In 2018, local governments which were affected by the earthquake started fundraisers to show gratitude to Taiwan's help back at 2011.