As they say online, Sakaekiko Ninomiya is “in a very Chinese time” of her life.

The 28-year-old Tokyo native, an MBA student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, sanitizes dishes with hot tea at restaurants, treats her hay fever with acupuncture and converses easily in Mandarin with curious taxi drivers.

Ninomiya shares snippets of her everyday reality in China with roughly 33,000 followers on Instagram and 44,000 on Xiaohongshu (known in English as RedNote), a Chinese social media and e-commerce platform that blends elements of Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest and has more than 300 million monthly active users.

But this is a far cry from “ Chinamaxxing ,” a recent social media trend where Westerners adopt Chinese customs or practices with ardent superficiality: drinking hot water, dabbling in tai chi or even simply wearing red.

Ninomiya’s videos are part of a yearslong journey in which she has readily embraced a life abroad, reflected in clips that show her doing everything from getting massages and…