In order to further strengthen international cultural exchange and cooperation and enhance mutual understanding between Chinese and Japanese university students, the School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Department of International Studies of Kwansei Gakuin University of Japan successfully held an online exchange meeting between Chinese and Japanese university students on December 15. Professor Shifu Kei, Assistant to the President of Kwansei Gakuin University, Professor Huang Jianxiang, vice Dean of Japanese Department of the School of Foreign Languages, and Watanabe Ryohei, faculty representative, and more than 40 students and faculty from both sides attended the meeting.

The exchange event took the form of a ZOOM video conference and was hosted by Ryohei Watanabe. Professor Shifuqi and Professoro Huang Jianxiang delivered speeches for the event. Both sides expressed that despite the fact that the two schools could not meet offline due to the epidemic, they hoped to enhance mutual understanding through online communication and looked forward to the continuation of such communication activities in the future.

Before the exchange meeting, students from both schools organized and prepared well, and recorded videos related to the theme. The students from Class 2019 of the Japanese Department  gave a detailed introduction on the theme of "lying flat", including the current situation, its causes and effects, and collected the students' opinions of it through a questionnaire. The third-year international students of Kwansei Gakuin University conducted an in-depth study on "how to solve the problem of local tourism and employment", introducing the background of Japan's economic downturn and the difficulties of economic reconstruction, and proposing a solution to unleashing local economic vitality by stimulating local consumption and tourist spending.

During the exchange session, students discussed why they chose to major in Japanese, their impressions of Japan, and the current situation of the epidemic in Japan, which quickly brought students from both schools closer and enlivened the atmosphere of the exchange session. Student representatives from both sides expressed their thoughts after watching the video and asked questions about its content. Xu Enuo, a student from the School of Foreign Languages, introduced to Japanese students the platform “Dianping”, which integrates various life services such as food, group buying and travelling.

After that, the students had a lively discussion on the theme of the conference, asking questions and expressing their opinions on how young people face fierce competition, values of different societies, local economic development, and preferences of tourist destinations. The exchange session finally ended successfully in a free exchange of discussions. The event promoted the communication between the students of the two schools, improved their international expression ability, and made the students of the School of Foreign Languages realize that "telling Chinese stories and spreading Chinese voices" was an important responsibility placed upon the youth by the times.