Chasing the Japanese Dream

Andreas Seibert / Lookatonline for TIME

Le Yiping, The 25-year-old student, who hosts a Chinese-language program on the Internet, wants to improve China's image in Japan

Wu Tongtong had an urgent need to learn Japanese. Growing up in the grimy northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, his biggest passion was video games. But amping up the onscreen action required Wu to master Japanese commands. Japan's brutal wartime occupation of Shenyang and other parts of China, which continues to stoke Chinese anger today, mattered little in the face of achieving total domination in his favorite video game. Both the computer and linguistic skills have since paid off. Today, Wu, 27, works in Tokyo as a software consultant, part of an influx of highly skilled Chinese labor that...

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