Politically, there are few nations that the Chinese dislike more than their maritime neighbour, Japan. Historical grievances, disputed territory and contemporary geo-strategic orientations cast a dark shadow across the East China Sea. But even as diplomatic finger-pointing continues apace, on the sociological front matcha has taken to nestling cozily by the oolong. I lived in Beijing between 2002 and 2009, and later in Tokyo from 2016 to 2020. Beijing in the 2000s was earthy, loud, and unfiltered. People spat in the streets, shouted into their phones, and conducted intensely personal conversations, including about their bowel movements, in public. There was a directness that defined social interaction. “You’re Indian?” a taxi driver might ask me. “Very poor country. Too many people. Why doesn’t the government do something about it?”So many conversations in China turned political very quickly. The average person may not have been able to express herself freely in the manner typical of more liberal polities, via street demonstrations or social media, but political diagnoses were ubiquitous. It had been nigh impossible to say “Ni hao” without someone telling me their opinion about the state of world affairs (abysmal), democracy (too chaotic) corruption (everywhere), and even telecom policy (more competition needed)Tokyo, by contrast, operated according to a very different, more hushed, social grammar. Life was highly codified, shaped by an acute awareness of others. There were countless gradations of politeness. In Chinese, ‘thanks’ was ‘xie xie’, end of the matter. In Japanese, there was ‘arigatou’ – informal, ‘arigatou gozaimasu’ – proper form, ‘domo arigatou gozaimasu’ – seriously thankful and ‘domo sumimasen arigatou gozaimasu,’ – weak-in-the-knees-with gratitude. The Japanese rarely stated opinions plainly; instead, meaning was conveyed indirectly, usually through what was left unsaid. “You’re Indian?” a taxi driver might ask me. And in response to an affirmative, there was rarely more than “aa, sō” (ah, I see), the vowel at the end of the phrase tapering off into cryptic ether. And despite Japan’s political status as a democracy, in general, I’d have had more luck engaging someone in conversation about cat dental hygiene than electoral preference. Imagine my surprise, then, upon returning to China (after a 17 year long gap) a few months ago, to find Beijing increasingly Tokyo-fied. The term “Japanification” when deployed in a China context is more often used in economic discussions – usually referring to stagnation or demographic decline – but what I’m talking about is dogs in prams, pollen allergies, blossom worship, Harajuku fashions, shokunin-style baristas at temples to third-wave coffee and the embrace of kawaii kitsch. More than once over these last few months, I’ve spotted behaviour in Beijing that has left me unmoored, momentarily convinced I was in Tokyo. One of the first moments of aporia that I encountered was running into two tiny dogs dressed in sweaters, ensconced in a child’s buggy on the banks of central Beijing’s Liangma He. Now Tokyo had been the land of limitless canine humiliation. Local pooches decked out in cutesy bows and monogrammed co-ord-sets were ubiquitous. There, on encountering a pram it was a 50-50 chance as to whether the occupant was a baby or a dog.But China was the land of dog-eaters, where not so long ago Mao Zedong had condemned pets as bourgeois decadence. It got curiouser and curiouser. The owner of the sweatered dogs was soon joined by a friend carrying the hairy tangle of a Lhasa Apso in a front-pack. Dressed in overalls and a bucket hat, the friend looked like she had stepped out of a Uniqlo lookbook, quite plausibly so given that one of Uniqlo’s global flagship stores was located only a few hundred meters away, in the glass and chrome altar of aspirational retail called Taikoo Li.This was an area thronged by Gen Z hipsters, many in full cosplay regalia – wigs, fake eyelashes, footwear of alarming architectural ambition. Young women in schoolgirl pigtails toted cat-shaped bags festooned with Labubu toys. Japan may have borrowed much of its classical civilisation from China — the written script, Buddhism, silk. But evidently the old tributary had reversed course, sending its kawaii cargo — anime-styles, mascots and collectible kitsch – surging back upstream into the very wellspring from which it had once drunk.Representative image. People line up for the opening of Germany’s first shop for Labubu plush dolls in Berlin, Germany, Friday, July 25, 2025. Photo: AP/PTIChairman Mao, one imagines, would be rotating vertiginously in his grave – what with the dogs in prams, the French maid outfits and the freaky cuteness of Labubu toys. It is difficult to picture Xi Jinping having had any of this in mind while penning his foundational thesis on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, either.The New Era in China happens to increasingly smell like coffee of a distinctly Japanese roast. China’s coffee market has been growing at 21 percent annually since 2010, more than ten times the global average, and Beijing’s exploding café scene reflects this. Where these spaces once mimicked the globalised aesthetic of American Starbucks chains, many newer ones now resemble something closer to the Japanese shokunin ideal: slow pours, exact measurements, quiet focus, the ceaseless quest for elusive perfection. It can take an age to get a cup at these places — the baristas stare into the drip of the concoction in a Zen-like meditative trance, the journey clearly more important than the destination, though caffeine-deprived customers like me don’t always agree. I have been offered beans roasted in red wine and described in terms that would put oenologues to shame.And then there is Spring. In my memory, spring in Beijing was all about sandstorms that swept across the capital, rendering the skies a viscous, churning orange. Fast forward to today, and the streets are filled with blushing pink blossoms — cherry, crab apple, magnolia. Beijingers throng parks, jostling for the best spots to photograph the trees in true Tokyo style — in Japan, certain sakura trees command the kind of devoted following that used to be reserved for Mandopop stars in China.It is a remarkable transformation. During the Mao era, mass campaigns mobilised communities to cut down forests to fuel backyard furnaces and to clear land for grain. The trees paid the price. Over the last two decades, Beijing has reversed course with massive afforestation efforts, including an embrace of ornamental flowering trees.But there is often a cost to beauty and blossoms are no exception. The embrace of the tree has led to a spike in seasonal allergies — a very Japanese problem. In Tokyo, hay fever season was a ritual as culturally embedded as hanami itself: the sneezing, the masks, the pharmaceutically assisted picnicking under the very trees responsible for one’s misery. (Pollen-induced allergic rhinitis was the reason why the Japanese were habituated to mask wearing long before COVID made it a global trend). Now that bourgeois malaise has hitched a ride out west on the ornamental trees: allergy cases in China jumped from 11 percent of the population in 2005 to 18 percent in 2021, with younger demographics increasingly affected.The dogs, bucket hats, coffee and blossoms are not the full inventory of urban China’s Japanese texture. Beijing’s streets have also grown notably safer— another Japanese hallmark. Japan is the land where what is lost is almost always found. During the four years we lived there, between the four members of my family, we lost wallets, lunch boxes, phones, jackets, metro passes and a laptop. We recovered every single item, sometimes within hours. Not a sterling recommendation for our family’s personal habits, but a ringing endorsement of Japan. According to Tokyo police statistics, a record 4.49 billion yen — roughly $30 million — in lost cash was turned in by conscientious finders in 2024 alone.Chinese cities have undergone a remarkable transformation on this front too, though with a difference. Japan’s lost-and-found culture runs on civic trust, China’s on surveillance cameras and digital transaction trails. The mechanisms might differ, but the outcomes—cities that are largely crime and scam free havens for lost and found property — increasingly, converge. True to form, my son recently left his AirPods in a cab. The driver had them delivered to our home the next day.Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi speaks to reporters at the prime minister’s office in Tokyo after a strong earthquake struck northeastern Japan. Photo: AP.And yet — contra Joseph Nye and the idea that cultural soft power generates political affinity — none of this cultural borrowing has in fact softened the geopolitical animosity between the two countries. In recent months, hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens cancelled planned trips to Japan — a tourist boycott in response to Japanese PM, Sanae Takaichi, hawkish Taiwan rhetoric. These are often the very same people who queue for pour-over coffees and photograph themselves under cherry blossom trees. Japanese influence in China is aesthetic — it shapes what people wear and eat and covet, not what they think or feel about Japan as a nation.A substack essay by Yaqi Li, Whose Cherry Blossoms Are These, captures this paradox. Analysing a viral AI film made by a Chinese creator using Chinese tools yet saturated in Japanese visual grammar, he argues that Japanese cultural influence in China has been so thoroughly absorbed it can now be reproduced algorithmically — no Japanese creators, studios or institutions required. He calls it ‘sovereignless soft power,’ or cultural influence without a sovereign beneficiary. Finally, it is also worth noting who, exactly, has been Japanified. In China, the phenomenon is largely confined to the urban, educated and younger — a cohort that increasingly resembles its counterparts in Tokyo, Seoul or Singapore more than its own rural compatriots. Travel even half an hour away from the hipster hangouts of central Beijing and the locals still spit and swear with the kind of uninhibited vigour that would put the average Tokyoite into immediate cardiac arrest. The matcha has not reached everywhere.Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With ‘Writing on the Great Wall’, she places her eye on China’s economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.