Liu Dong left her family in China to build a future for them in Japan. (ABC News: Supplied)
As Liu Dong boarded a plane from Shanghai to Osaka in 2023, she walked on with an apprehension only outweighed by her determination to escape.
China's most populous city had the year before endured a months-long lockdown, under which its 24 million residents lived through some of the world's strictest anti-COVID measures.
Ms Liu was desperate for a new start, describing the experience as a past she wants to forget.
"I was really craving freedom after the Shanghai lockdown, so I wanted to start fresh in Japan," she said.
But her family, including her nine-year-old son, decided to stay.
"I told [them] I wanted to figure out a backup plan so that in the future, my son can have another option," she said.
"My family said all sorts of harsh things to me, like 'You're abandoning your family and child.'"
Ms Liu said it was difficult to restart her life in Japan, but it was worth it. (ABC News: Supplied)
Building a better life
Ms Liu is one of thousands of Chinese immigrants who have moved to Japan to seek a new life after being traumatised by China's strict zero-COVID era.
China's emergence from that period was abrupt, marking a rare recent instance where public frustrations erupted into protests that prompted a government response. Just five months after the end of the Shanghai lockdown, a deadly residential building fire in Xinjiang ignited China's White Paper protests.
Residents took to the streets protesting with blank A4 sheets of paper, to express their dissatisfaction with the government's strict COVID measures.
The movement quickly spread all across the country, and at the end of 2022 the policy was suddenly lifted.
Despite the radical reopening, the economy hasn't bounced back and increasing numbers of Chinese are migrating, searching for a different quality of life.
Ms Liu described her first three months in Japan as a painful experience, having to start fresh in a city where she doesn't even speak the language.
Ms Liu said people in similar situations to her also felt the challenges of migrating were worth it. (ABC News: Supplied)
"I would start crying every time I see a child on the street because they reminded me of my son," she said.
Despite the hardships, Ms Liu firmly believes that she is building a future for her family in Japan.
She thinks one of the benefits of living there is that children are treated with more respect in school.
Now, part of her job is visiting other Chinese immigrants in Japan to share their stories on her social media account.
"I interviewed many people, and they all felt the same as I do," she said.
At the end of the day, she feels most people she's encountered still believe that the challenges of migration were worth it.
Japanese authorities did not implement crackdowns as severe as China's government did during the pandemic. (AP: Eugene Hoshiko)
Censors filtering out anti-Japanese sentiment
Chinese people are the largest group of immigrants in Japan.
As of June, 844,000 of the more than 3.3 million foreigners living in Japan were Chinese, according to government data.
That's up from 762,000 in 2022 and 654,000 a decade ago.
The country might seem like a strange choice for Chinese migrants, considering historical tensions and a rise of nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiments in China.
China's compulsory patriotic education
Photo shows A close up of a large group of performers in blue and white uniforms waving CCP flags at centenary celebrations.
"I would say it's always there because of the systematic [way] the nationalism is embedded in the education system and also the propaganda machine," says Rose Luqiu, an associate professor of journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University.
However, Dr Luqiu has noticed a change lately.
In September, a 10-year-old Japanese boy was fatally stabbed near his school in southern China, ratcheting up tensions between Beijing and Tokyo, which had been asking Chinese authorities to do more to ensure the safety of their citizens.
It was the second attack on Japanese children in China in a matter of months, and prompted the Japanese embassy in Beijing to warn its nationals there to be on alert.
Dr Luqiu thinks since that attack, and as Beijing tries to attract more tourists to prop up the struggling economy, censors have worked harder to limit anti-Japanese sentiment on China's highly controlled internet.
"The surge in nationalism is the consequence of the state propaganda, but it seems to be changing recently," she said.
"After the attacks, finally, you can see less content like that [so] I do think the government started to censor certain kinds of content.
"In China, everything can be controlled, so if they want to make a more positive image of the country … the narrative or the content online would be easy to control."
Ms Liu hopes her social media account might go some way to building more understanding between Japanese and Chinese people.
"I want to improve my Japanese so I can start talking to Japanese people as well, hopefully bridging the gap between China and Japan," she told the ABC.
Ditching comedy for real estate
Regardless, that tension is still front of mind for Wang Bing, who moved to Japan in 2021 to start his own real estate agency.
While he didn't experience the same kind of pushback from his family over his decision to move to Japan as Ms Liu did, he worries whenever he visits home.
Wang Bing doesn't tell people he lives in Japan when he travels back to China. (ABC News: Xin-yun Wu)
"I would tell my wife and son to not mention that we travelled from Japan," he said of their annual trips back to China.
Mr Wang had been working the stand-up comedy scene in Shanxi, in northern China, but felt increasingly hampered by the country's strict censorship and limitations on his creative freedom.
"The local cultural department would ask us to save seven tickets for them at every show in case they wanted to come and inspect [our material]," he said.
As a real estate agent in Osaka, his main clientele are people from China wanting to purchase houses across the Kansai area.
Some are seeking homes while others want to buy properties to rent — one way for Chinese immigrants to apply for Japan's Business Manager Visa.
Wang Bing was told by a fan that he would likely get in trouble if he performed his style of comedy in China these days. (ABC News: Xin-yun Wu)
Mr Wang said some of his clients are business owners who have fears about the economy in China, so they choose somewhere they think is safer to live — jokingly describing them as birds seeking better trees in which to nest.
"So many people from Shanghai and Zhejiang came here, most of them didn't even care about how they're going to make a living," he said, adding that he noticed a surge in migration after the Chinese government ended its COVID-zero policy in 2022.
There are strict limits on moving funds out of China, so Japan is also appealing as a safe place to keep money, particularly for middle class and wealthy Chinese.
"In Japan, as in the United States and the Western world, the respect of private property is a cornerstone of the system," says Q. Edward Wang, the coordinator of the Asian Studies program at Rowan University.
"But in China during the past five years or so, the policy is to develop a so-called 'communal wealth'.
"We all know some of the crackdowns on some of the super-rich people, like the head of Tencent and the head of Alibaba … now, of course, the policy has been changed, but this fear is still there."
China's crackdown on 'excessive' wealth
Photo shows Chinese President Xi Jinping raises a glass of wine while standing in front of a Chinese flag
Alibaba founder Jack Ma was among those Chinese immigrants who'd reportedly moved to Japan, working as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo.
More broadly though, Japan offers greater freedoms than China, particularly under the increasingly repressive rule of Xi Jinping, and is comfortable and still close to home.
"[There's] a strong sense of distrust of what the government is able to do," Mr Wang said.
"[People] want to basically take charge of their own life, and if you go to China today you will see a lot of complaints and criticisms and so on of the government policies.
"So this distrust, I think, is the biggest motivation for any people with some resources to move out … if not their own person, their assets."
A fan of Mr Wang's stand-up comedy reached out to him after he went to Japan a while ago, telling him that his old set would never fly nowadays.
Mr Wang felt like it was a validation of his decision to move to Japan.
"I knew if I didn't leave, I would get into trouble for what I said."
