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The 22-year-old found it hard to grasp the Japanese fervour for their brutal past, but has learnt to respect the cross-cultural differences.
As he settled in, the Beijing University student also met many Japanese who kept asking him: 'Are you Chinese really so disgusted with us?'
Over several sessions of sake and beer, he has been telling them that there are many Chinese willing to be friends with the Japanese.
The Japanese and Chinese governments now want more of their young people to do just that.
Visiting Beijing last month, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda signed an agreement to boost a bilateral youth exchange programme to its largest-ever this year, involving 4,000 high school and university students.
Building on the warmest neighbourly ties in recent years, Tokyo and Beijing are stepping up long- running exchange programmes to soften their people's negative views of each other - a key stumbling block to a better country-to-country relationship.
Disputes such as the long-standing one over gas and oil resources and territory in the East China Sea will always come up, but bad blood on the ground makes solving diplomatic quarrels trickier.
'The deep mistrust and suspicion among people on both sides is the toughest issue in bilateral ties - it makes it easy to fan nationalistic sentiment whenever there is a dispute,' said China-Japan expert Gui Yongtao of Beijing University.
Japan and China are banking on the next generation to repair and lift ties.
During his four days in Beijing, Mr Fukuda took pains to win over young Chinese.
In a televised 40-minute speech at the elite Beijing University, he called on Chinese youth to build trust with their Japanese peers so that the two countries will finally be a stabilising force in the region.
At a breakfast gathering hosted by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Mr Fukuda picked out a table of Chinese secondary school students from among the 200 guests and strolled over to chat.
Contrary to popular belief, mutual misgivings between the two Asian giants developed only quite recently.
They plunged to their lowest point during the 2001 to 2006 premiership of Mr Junichiro Koizumi, who repeatedly visited the Yasukuni shrine, irking Beijing into suspending top-level meetings.
While more than 60 per cent of Japanese polled in the late 1970s viewed China positively, by 2006, the same percentage gave it the thumbs down. Comparable data on the Chinese side is hard to come by, but scholars note a similar recent reversal of goodwill towards Japan.
Polls in China in recent years consistently put Japan at the bottom of a list of countries the Chinese feel 'favourable' towards.
In a March 2005 survey, for instance, more than 64 per cent of the Chinese polled said they had an 'unfavourable' picture of Japan, compared with almost 40 per cent who felt the same way towards the United States.
Even as bilateral economic ties grow exponentially, China remains vexed over what it sees as Japan's repeated glorification of its wartime history, while Japan watches China's rise with worry.
Polls show that these complex emotions are held by the young and old alike, but it is the young - with their vicarious experience of World War II - who take their unhappiness onto the streets or into cyberspace.
And while the typical Chinese youngster is crazy over Japanese anime and computer games, many refuse to buy Sony appliances, Toyota cars or even eat sushi.
The Internet's quick interactivity and its wealth of hate literature rile up the young more readily, said Professor Liu Jiangyong of Qinghua University.
Today's youngsters also came of age during Mr Koizumi's era, when bilateral ties were summed up as 'politics cold, economy hot'.
Said Prof Liu: 'All a Chinese child might have seen of Japan was Mr Koizumi visiting the Yasukuni shrine. Likewise, a Japanese child would have heard a lot about the 'China threat' from Japanese media.'
It takes direct contact to dilute and nuance those polarised images, said Mr Wang, who started school in Tokyo just months after Chinese students staged anti-Japanese demonstrations across a few major Chinese cities in April 2005.
'We should interact person to person, not as representatives of our countries,' he said.
Agreeing, Japanese exchange student Yoshikazu Kato, 23, who has been at Beijing University on a Japanese government scholarship for four years, added: 'We should all have questioning minds so that we do not react purely emotionally to events and media reports.'
The warm and measured tone set by top politicians of late helps.
Following an 'ice-breaking' visit to Beijing by Mr Fukuda's predecessor Shinzo Abe in October 2006 and a 'thawing' return trip by Premier Wen to Tokyo last April, the polls posted an increase in public goodwill, Chinese media reported last August.
With a bilateral project to explore wartime history underway, Mr Fukuda has declared that he will not visit the Yasukuni shrine, and China marked the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing massacre quietly last month.
Whatever method the Chinese and Japanese use to learn about each other, an open mind is the key, said Mr Wang.
'If you do not interact just to reinforce your own stereotypes or sense of superiority, you will discover that people are the same everywhere,' he said.
