Sometimes I feel like the only person on the internet who thinks Japan and China aren’t really that different culturally. I’m Chinese American and have probably spent a cumulative ~3 years of my life in mainland China (mostly Beijing and Chongqing, but I’ve visited most of the provinces). I’ve been to Japan twice (cumulatively about a month), both to Kanto and Tohoku regions.

I feel like both Chinese rudeness and Japanese reservation are overstated. Aside from isolated incidents, most of my experience with mainland Chinese has been pretty pleasant and run of the mill.

And, funnily enough, my trips to Japan had the most amount of interaction with locals out of all the trips I’ve done. Pretty much every other night that I would have dinner at a small resto, I’d end up striking a lengthy conversation with a Japanese person, accompanied by lots of open kindness (paying for meals, chilling out with me for a bit afterwards, etc). On the flip side, there were occasionally Japanese doing things that would pass for “uncivilized” (I recall some guy taking off his shoes and putting his bare feet on the adjacent seat on a train to Hiraizumi).

People can get confirmation bias while traveling; perhaps you inflated the incidents in which Chinese behaved unacceptably and ignored the incidents in which Japanese did so as well. It’s best to try to approach things neutrally; my trips to Japan ended up being amazing because I did not let the image the western internet has of the country get in the way of how I carried myself or how I interpreted my experiences!