[DiogenesKynikos]

It's easy to come up with many examples of major Chinese cultural elements in the surrounding countries.

I'll give just one obvious example: Kanji. Kanji is obviously a major part of Japanese culture. It literally means "Chinese characters," because that's what it was adapted from.[0]

Or to give you just one more example, because it's incredibly striking: Japan's own name for itself, Nihon/Nippon, is borrowed from Chinese. The same is actually true of "Vietnam," which is also a loanword from Chinese.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

[witchesindublin]

But relative impact is low. Latin and Indian scripts are used throughout Asia as well, including Japan. i.e. to say that it is the "greece of asia" is a bit over-chauvinistic.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Somewhere around half of the words in modern Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese are borrowed from Chinese. The impact of Chinese culture is massive across the board in these countries.

[witchesindublin]

Half the words in modern Japanese is a long stretch. All Japanese words have two readings so obviously you can say that, but only one of those readings is used in daily conversation.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The linguistic influence of Chinese in Japanese is similar to the linguistic influence of Latin and French on English. The more elevated a subject, the higher the percentage of Latin or French borrowings.

Everyday spoken language will have a lower rate of loanwords, but writing about any complex subject will have a higher level.

Once you get into philosophy, politics, literature, etc., you're dealing with a high level of borrowing, both in the case of English and of Japanese.

But regardless of whether the true rate of loanwords from Chinese is 20% or 50%, this is a massive level of linguistic influence. And again, this is just one aspect of China's cultural influence on Japan. I mentioned the Kanji writing system earlier, which is very important in Japanese culture, but I could also point out many other areas where there's significant Chinese influence, such as literature, philosophy or religion, or even more banal things like the game of Go, which is one of the most popular games in China, Korea and Japan.