Squid Game Through Asian Eyes: Insights from Chinese, Japanese & Korean Fans

During the National Day holiday many people watched movies, but this article focuses on analyzing the most talked‑about TV series at the end of September – Netflix’s Squid Game . The show topped Netflix’s global TV rankings and sparked massive discussion across China, Japan, and Korea.

Chinese Netizens' Evaluation

In China, the primary source for ratings is Douban, which currently gives the series a score of 7.7, with most users rating it 4 or 5 stars. The following image shows the Douban rating distribution.

Selected popular comments from Douban are highlighted to illustrate common viewpoints.

Japanese Netizens' Evaluation

Japanese users on platforms similar to Douban gave the series an average of 3.8 out of 5, which translates to roughly 7.6 on Douban’s scale. Some users expressed doubts, which are explored later.

Data such as commenter name, time, rating, content, and likes were collected using a Python web‑scraper. The following code demonstrates how the comments were fetched and translated from Japanese to Chinese.

def translate(text):
    url = 'http://fanyi.youdao.com/translate?&doctype=json&type=ja2zh-CHS&i=' + text
    requ_text = requests.get(url)
    json_text = requ_text.json()
    data = json_text['translateResult'][0][0]['tgt']
    return data

After translating over 3,000 Japanese comments, a word cloud was generated to visualize frequent terms. The most common keyword related to the series was "gambling apocalypse" (赌博默示录).

Emoji analysis revealed that the crying face 😭 was the most used emoji, even surpassing the squid emoji 🦑 used in the show’s title.

Korean Netizens' Evaluation

South Korean viewers could not be evaluated through ratings because Naver does not provide them publicly; instead, view counts of trailers were examined.

Additional observations include Korean media referencing Chinese social platforms like Weibo and Douyin when discussing the series’ popularity.

Overall, the analysis shows how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean audiences perceive Squid Game differently, highlighting cultural nuances in rating behavior, keyword emphasis, and emoji expression.

Readers are invited to share their own thoughts on the series.