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The story
A Chinese X (Twitter) user’s post went viral after declaring, “I long for a student life like in Japanese anime — in China we’re up at 6am, in bed at 10pm, and stuck at school for 16 hours a day.” On 5ch, the post kicked off a thread where users traded real photos of Chinese schools alongside comparisons of Japan-China education costs, GDP, and trust rankings, with the discussion snowballing from simple sympathy into a full-blown national power showdown.
Li baitian@LiYuchigz9r
Translated from Chinese
I genuinely, desperately want to study in Japan. China’s approach to education is unbelievably high-pressure — up at 6am, lights out at 10pm, stuck at school for 16 hours a day 😭 I wonder if people overseas can really understand this feeling? I’d love to live even one day as a Japanese student, but sadly that’s just a fantasy. Tomorrow I’m back in that “prison” again. I’m going to save up and make it to Japan someday, for sure.
Source: x.com / Original post here
What people said
Anime, manga, and games are basically opium for escaping reality
Then again, just looking at the numbers, China's social problems are way worse
Well, studying's probably just so brutal there they want to escape, plain and simple
[Chongqing Nankai Liangjiang Middle School]
Looks like there's a watchtower right in the middle
Every single window looks like it's got iron bars on it
This is literally that unhinged school life Chiikawa parodied (a hit cute-character manga/anime known for gag arcs that turn surprisingly grim) — playing out for real
Looks like a dystopia, kind of unsettling
It's a library and they're just papering over it with book-pattern wallpaper?
That's… something
Ranked: The Countries With the Most Billionaires in 2026
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-with-most-billionaires-in-2026/
🇨🇳China 9h 2m
🇺🇸USA 8h 59m
🇫🇷France 8h 33m
🌏World average 8h 29m
🇬🇧UK 8h 28m
🇰🇷South Korea 7h 51m
🇯🇵Japan 7h 42m
Japan ranks dead last in sleep time among 33 countries — and dead last in economic growth too
There's gotta be some connection here, right?
#1 🇯🇵Japan
#2 🇰🇷South Korea
#3 🇮🇳India
#4 🇧🇷Brazil
#5 🇲🇽Mexico
https://www.asahi.com/sp/articles/ASV3F3WLTV3FUTFK00KM.html
#1 🇨🇳China
…
#3 🇯🇵Japan
The times are changing and there's no stopping it — Japan is in decline
Naturally, the world's most trustworthy country 😤
The Meiji Restoration ← Pushed modernization hard so as not to end up colonized like the Qing
Japan today ← Still smug, thinking it's above China
China ← The whole country is studying like mad to overtake Japan, and its top talent goes straight into AI and robotics development
It's less "still smug" and more that Japan already hit its #1 postwar goal — reconstruction — so with no goal left, it just stopped trying that hard
Even if you only gathered decent, level-headed people, everyone feels a totally different degree of crisis about Japan's current state
And on top of that, there are people out there who are basically pure malice, so it turns into a defensive crouch just trying to survive that environment
Japanese students aren't even in the same league
Isn't that just because only the elite Chinese students make it there in the first place?
Yeah, they're hurling some seriously mixed-up feelings at us
Caught between CCP propaganda, the glittering admiration for Japan from the 1970s-90s, and the fact that, whatever else, Japan genuinely became a country that doesn't go to war after the war
You guys never even go there, so it doesn't matter lol
Even though Tokyo University is nothing special by world standards,
once you're in, the rest of your life is basically easy mode
If a Todai student had been born in China instead of Japan,
they'd only get into some mid-tier Chinese university
and have to grind through a hard life
When a Todai grad applied to a top Chinese company, they got rejected outright for not being academically strong enough
Even Todai med school grads only earn half what their South Korean counterparts do, so they're "losers" too
Do stuff like this and national strength is bound to decline, obviously
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/c2bca30ba1871a2a74a8c6f7db33284f70d5ccd9
Chinese home appliance giant 🇨🇳Hisense took the #1 spot with a 40.4% share, while 🇨🇳TCL came in third at 9.5% — together the two companies command 49.9% of the market.
Hisense, which claimed the top spot, acquired Toshiba's (formerly Toshiba Visual Solutions) TV brand "Regza," and boosted Regza's competitiveness through supply-chain sourcing and business-division restructuring. On top of that, Hisense has also been waging an aggressive low-price offensive under its own brand, and has carved out a solid position in the Japanese market.
Backed by excellent cost performance, it's winning over Japanese consumers too, and the old idea that "if you're buying appliances, buy Japanese" seems to be fading.
Background and Key Points
Background readers need: schools like Chongqing Nankai Liangjiang and the “papered-over” Tianjin Binhai library are part of China’s hyper-competitive gaokao system, where elite feeder schools run boarding-military schedules (roughly 6am–10pm) built to produce the scores needed for a shrinking pool of top-university seats. This is not standard for all of China’s ~180 million secondary students — it’s the “super middle school” model (the Hengshui-style approach) reserved for high-achievers chasing an edge in a brutally oversubscribed exam. On the Japanese side, the “anime school life” the original poster longs for is itself a nostalgic, softened image; Japan had its own decades of exam-hell juku culture before 2000s-era “yutori” reforms eased hours, and Japanese students today still average the least sleep among the 33 countries cited in the thread.
The thread didn’t really stay split on education — sympathy for the Chinese student was nearly unanimous early on, and the real fault line was whether that sympathy should translate into “Japan is still better off” or “China is now winning anyway,” with posters pivoting to GDP growth, billionaire counts, AI rankings, and appliance market share (Hisense/TCL’s ~50% of Japan’s TV market) as proxies for national decline.
What’s likely misunderstood: several “China is #1” claims posted (AI leadership, trust rankings) are cherry-picked or sourced from single infographics rather than robust comparative studies, and the Asahi “most trustworthy countries” link doesn’t actually support the ranking claimed. No one in the thread mentioned that Hisense’s TV dominance came partly from directly acquiring Toshiba’s Regza brand, not from out-innovating it.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Chinese person: “I long for a school life like in Japanese anime… in China it’s study, study, study all day!!!!”“.
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