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 composition of that negativity is more complicated than headlines imply.

Still, this youth openness should not be mistaken for warmth. It appears to reflect a pragmatic economic assessment – China is Japan’s largest trading partner – rather than genuine affinity. When it comes to security and territorial disputes, young Japanese are no less concerned than their elders. And given that Chinese nationalism has been amplified online in ways that specifically target Japan, the space for generational goodwill to develop has narrowed considerably.

The data also reveals an asymmetry in how each country views the relationship. Japanese respondents in the Genron NPO’s 2024 survey understood the bilateral relationship to be important, if troubled – 65.1 percent still said China-Japan ties were important, down from 74.8 percent the previous year. On the Chinese side, the perceived importance collapsed. The percentage of Chinese respondents who believe China-Japan relations are important dropped from 77.9 percent to 23.7 percent in a single year – a collapse without precedent in the survey’s history. 

As Genron noted in the survey overview, “In the last twenty years, regardless of how intense the inter-governmental conflict between the two countries grew, the percentage of respondents in both countries who felt the relationship is important never dropped below 60%.” Now it’s fallen below 30 percent in China.

This asymmetry is diplomatically dangerous. When one side stops caring whether the relationship improves, the other side loses leverage. Japan’s repeated diplomatic overtures to Beijing during and after the Takaichi crisis – including sending the director general of the Asian and Oceanian Bureau to Beijing in an attempt to de-escalate – were rebuffed, with Chinese media broadcasting footage of the Japanese envoy appearing to bow awkwardly to his counterpart. Humiliation, not dialogue, was the signal Beijing wished to send.

The diplomatic rupture that began in November 2025 was not simply a product of one politician’s unscripted candor. Takaichi overturned Japan’s carefully cultivated posture of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, making explicit what had previously been implicit about Japan’s potential military role in any cross-strait conflict. But the ferocity of Beijing’s response – threatening language from diplomats, economic coercion, cancellation of cultural exchanges – paradoxically reinforced the very concerns that might justify Japan’s security posture. Some experts noted that the dispute actually helped raise Takaichi’s domestic popularity.

The structural drivers of Japanese wariness toward China – territorial disputes in the East China Sea, China’s military buildup, historical memory, and the Taiwan question – are not going away. If anything, Japan’s ongoing defense expansion, which will give it the world’s third-largest defense budget by 2027, will continue to generate friction with Beijing. The Takaichi crisis has already escalated in 2026, with China restricting exports of rare earth materials to Japan, turning economic interdependence into a source of strategic vulnerability.

Yet the data also contains a thread worth watching. Most Japanese still believe the bilateral relationship is important, especially on the economic front, even if they view China negatively. A growing share of Japanese respondents – nearly 30 percent in the Sasakawa Peace Foundation’s 2024 survey on Japanese views of China, up from 24 percent in 2022 – selected strengthening economic relations with China as one of the most effective paths forward for the bilateral relationship. 

On the other hand, the Pew Research Center found that views of China became slightly more positive in 15 of 25 countries surveyed in early 2025. Similarly, a survey released this April by ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute shows that across ASEAN, 52 percent of respondents would choose China over the United States if forced to decide, compared with 48 percent who favored the United States. Taken together, these results can be seen partly as a counterreaction to perceived American unpredictability under the Trump administration.

Japan is unlikely to be part of that global softening anytime soon. The Takaichi crisis has further eroded what little goodwill remained on both sides. But the survey data, accumulated patiently over 20 years, tells a more complicated story than pure hostility: a Japanese public that distrusts China profoundly but has not yet given up on the idea that the relationship matters. Whether that lingering belief survives the next crisis – or the one after that – may ultimately depend less on diplomats than on whether the two governments can find a way to stop manufacturing crises to begin with.

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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 composition of that negativity is more complicated than headlines imply.

Still, this youth openness should not be mistaken for warmth. It appears to reflect a pragmatic economic assessment – China is Japan’s largest trading partner – rather than genuine affinity. When it comes to security and territorial disputes, young Japanese are no less concerned than their elders. And given that Chinese nationalism has been amplified online in ways that specifically target Japan, the space for generational goodwill to develop has narrowed considerably.

The data also reveals an asymmetry in how each country views the relationship. Japanese respondents in the Genron NPO’s 2024 survey understood the bilateral relationship to be important, if troubled – 65.1 percent still said China-Japan ties were important, down from 74.8 percent the previous year. On the Chinese side, the perceived importance collapsed. The percentage of Chinese respondents who believe China-Japan relations are important dropped from 77.9 percent to 23.7 percent in a single year – a collapse without precedent in the survey’s history. 

As Genron noted in the survey overview, “In the last twenty years, regardless of how intense the inter-governmental conflict between the two countries grew, the percentage of respondents in both countries who felt the relationship is important never dropped below 60%.” Now it’s fallen below 30 percent in China.

This asymmetry is diplomatically dangerous. When one side stops caring whether the relationship improves, the other side loses leverage. Japan’s repeated diplomatic overtures to Beijing during and after the Takaichi crisis – including sending the director general of the Asian and Oceanian Bureau to Beijing in an attempt to de-escalate – were rebuffed, with Chinese media broadcasting footage of the Japanese envoy appearing to bow awkwardly to his counterpart. Humiliation, not dialogue, was the signal Beijing wished to send.

The diplomatic rupture that began in November 2025 was not simply a product of one politician’s unscripted candor. Takaichi overturned Japan’s carefully cultivated posture of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, making explicit what had previously been implicit about Japan’s potential military role in any cross-strait conflict. But the ferocity of Beijing’s response – threatening language from diplomats, economic coercion, cancellation of cultural exchanges – paradoxically reinforced the very concerns that might justify Japan’s security posture. Some experts noted that the dispute actually helped raise Takaichi’s domestic popularity.

The structural drivers of Japanese wariness toward China – territorial disputes in the East China Sea, China’s military buildup, historical memory, and the Taiwan question – are not going away. If anything, Japan’s ongoing defense expansion, which will give it the world’s third-largest defense budget by 2027, will continue to generate friction with Beijing. The Takaichi crisis has already escalated in 2026, with China restricting exports of rare earth materials to Japan, turning economic interdependence into a source of strategic vulnerability.

Yet the data also contains a thread worth watching. Most Japanese still believe the bilateral relationship is important, especially on the economic front, even if they view China negatively. A growing share of Japanese respondents – nearly 30 percent in the Sasakawa Peace Foundation’s 2024 survey on Japanese views of China, up from 24 percent in 2022 – selected strengthening economic relations with China as one of the most effective paths forward for the bilateral relationship. 

On the other hand, the Pew Research Center found that views of China became slightly more positive in 15 of 25 countries surveyed in early 2025. Similarly, a survey released this April by ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute shows that across ASEAN, 52 percent of respondents would choose China over the United States if forced to decide, compared with 48 percent who favored the United States. Taken together, these results can be seen partly as a counterreaction to perceived American unpredictability under the Trump administration.

Japan is unlikely to be part of that global softening anytime soon. The Takaichi crisis has further eroded what little goodwill remained on both sides. But the survey data, accumulated patiently over 20 years, tells a more complicated story than pure hostility: a Japanese public that distrusts China profoundly but has not yet given up on the idea that the relationship matters. Whether that lingering belief survives the next crisis – or the one after that – may ultimately depend less on diplomats than on whether the two governments can find a way to stop manufacturing crises to begin with.

Peter Chai, or Kai Shibata, is a research associate in the Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University. His research areas are political sociology, comparative politics, and public opinion, and his regional focus is East Asia.

anti-China sentiments in Japan

anti-Japanese sentiment in China

China-Japan diplomacy

China-Japan people-to-people relations

China-Japan Relations

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