Features | Diplomacy | East Asia

The Deepening Deterioration of Public Sentiment Between Japan and China

What do Japanese and Chinese think about each other’s countries? Let’s look at the numbers.  

An anti-China protest in Roppongi, Japan, Sep. 29, 2010. The banner reads, “break off Japan-China relations.”

For two decades, Tokyo’s Genron NPO has been asking citizens of both China and Japan the same question: What do you think of the other country? What they have found is not a gradual drift but a punctuated collapse – sentiment lurches further downward with each new crisis and rarely recovers. 

On the Japanese side, the share of respondents with a poor impression of China rose from 38 percent in 2005 to 89 percent by 2024. The Chinese trajectory has been more volatile, swinging sharply with political events, but arriving at the same destination: by 2024, nearly 88 percent of Chinese respondents reported a bad impression of Japan. That is not erosion. It is a near-total inversion of public sentiment over a single generation.

China and Japan, the world’s second and fourth largest economies, are also close neighbors. They have a contentious territorial dispute in the East China Sea, and a history still raw enough to inflame public opinion at a moment’s notice. The latest downturn in relations is well underway. 

When Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae told Japan’s parliament in November 2025 that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, China responded with the full theater of what analysts call “wolf warrior diplomacy.” Beijing suspended seafood imports from Japan, advised its citizens against traveling there, suspended Japanese film releases, and canceled performances by Japanese artists. 

These political tensions have had immediate social and economic consequences. China had been Japan’s second-largest source of tourists in 2024, sending nearly 7 million visitors. By December 2025, that flow had sharply reversed – even as Japan set an overall record of 42.7 million tourist arrivals for the year. The timing was grimly ironic: earlier that same year, in April, China, Japan, and South Korea had jointly launched a 2025–26 cultural exchange year, featuring music, exhibitions, and sports.

The Takaichi crisis did not create Japan’s hostility toward China, or China’s toward Japan. It was simply the latest flare-up in a relationship that has been deteriorating for most of this century. The data show that it is structurally stuck. The crisis even swallowed the data meant to measure it: the Genron NPO’s 2025 survey – which would have captured public sentiment in both countries at the height of the row – was postponed indefinitely after the Chinese partner organization pulled out, citing the diplomatic situation. For now, there are no new numbers – and that itself is telling.

The current era of negative sentiment dates back to at least 2012-, when Japan’s nationalization of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands triggered some of the most violent anti-Japanese protests in China in decades. The highest share of Chinese respondents with a negative impression of Japan was 92.8 percent in 2013. That data was recorded the year after Tokyo nationalized the disputed islands, and anti-Japanese demonstrations erupted in several cities across China. 

Japanese sentiment was also at its worst during that period. But while Chinese opinion of Japan fluctuated somewhat in subsequent years – improving slightly after COVID-19 travel restrictions were lifted – the Japanese view of China barely moved at all. It remained near 90 percent unfavorable year after year, regardless of whether bilateral relations were nominally warm or cold.

The most recent Genron data from 2024, released just before the Takaichi crisis erupted, confirmed the depth of this entrenchment. The percentage of Japanese having a bad impression of China was 89.0 percent – down a marginal 3.2 points from 2023 – while 87.7 percent of Chinese respondents had a bad impression of Japan, a near-record high. The numbers suggest a kind of mutual alienation that has resisted the goodwill-building efforts of tourism, business ties, and cultural exchange.

Japan’s Cabinet Office 2023 diplomatic survey reinforced the picture. The percentage of respondents who felt “familiar with China” or “somewhat familiar with China” dropped to 12.7 percent, the lowest since the question was first included in 1978, while those who felt “unfamiliar with China” rose to 86.7 percent, also a record high.

There is a demographic split within Japan. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2024 global attitudes survey, younger Japanese are somewhat more open to China – despite coming of age in a more polarized environment. Among Japanese adults aged 18 to 34, 38 percent said China has a positive impact on their country’s economic conditions, compared with 13 percent of those aged 50 and older – the largest such gap of any country in the survey. This suggests that while overall sentiment is negative, the generational........

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