One of my best friends in highschool was Korean and taught me two sentences in Korean. I still remember one of them.
Backwards engineering it gets me the latinized Neuneun yeppeuda which translates as You are pretty. My attempts to spell it nuh nun eepooda and similar were getting me You are a fool or Your eyes are big.
Columbus, Georgia has a Korean American community and Korean restaurants and a Korean church. I had Korean friends in school. So did my older brother.
I worked at Aflac in my forties. They were getting most of their money from Japan and the CEO spent one week or so out of every month in Japan. Gilbert Gottfried was the original voice of the Aflac duck in commercials and was fired after making jokes about Japan that Aflac felt was inappropriate following a disaster.
We got internal emails with articles and some had tidbits about Japan. My two sons are longtime fans of Japanese media, including anime and video games.
If you are American, you may have played Japanese games because Nintendo is a Japanese company. But unlike my sons, you probably aren't doing things like looking up explanations for what went wrong with the translation and regaling your mother with stories about how some word can mean blue or green, some word can mean feather or wing and rude characters who merely fail to use honorifics get translated as swearing a ridiculous amount which isn't really conveying the characterization they are shooting for.
I took a class in History of the Far East in college in my teens. It was taught by an Asian immigrant. I think he and his wife were both Chinese in origin and both taught classes at Columbus College. I knew her. I can't remember how anymore. I probably had some other class with her.
There is no clear, bright line dividing the history of Europe and of Asia.
China invented gun powder but only used it for pretty fireworks in the sky. Westerners weaponized it.
Some Italian explorer, possibly Marco Polo, brought noodles back from China. The pasta Italy is so famous for began in China. (No, I'm not fact checking that. This is intended to tell you what I know, not what copilot can scrape up and misinterpret.)
Dried noodles are shelf stable and are a civilizing force in a world where famine was one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, which is a metaphor for large scale disasters that tend to go together and promote each other. Famine leads to war and disease ("pestilence"), war and disease lead to famine and all lead to death.
Italy importing food culture from an older, more civilized place is one of the reasons Italians are famously civilized as heathen Westerners go.
The Great Wall of China can be seen from space. Copilot contradicts itself saying this is a common misconception and that its narrow width in most places and lack of illumination make it "difficult" to see from space without telescopic lenses.
It was built to keep out the Mongols who nonetheless were rulers of China for a time.
The Mongols made it to Europe, which seems to not be widely taught to Westerners. There is Mongol blood among French citizens.
Kamikaze means Divine Wind and if most Americans know the word at all, they probably know it as a name for suicide attacking World War II pilots but it originates in an older history where on more than one occasion Japan was saved from invading Chinese armies by a natural disaster, a weather event of some sort.
And I know some people don't know that because I had to explain that to someone on Hacker News. Though my quote there says Mongols not Chinese.
China is The Middle Kingdom iirc and Vietnam is the Southern Kingdom or something like that.
China basically quietly absorbed smaller places around it for thousands of years which is why it's so large.
I don't generally bother to CLAIM to know fuck all about Asia or Asian history because what I know is a drop in an ocean. But some of this came up earlier today and people seem to be excessively impressed with a Westerner knowing ANYTHING more than "Uh, China and Japan exist?"
Tokyo is not a single city as Westerners understand that term. China is also not really politically organized in any fashion that readily fits Western conceptualization, though History of the Far East was decades ago and I cannot off the top of my head give a quick and dirty overview.
Just be aware that what you IMAGINE you understand of Asia is probably wrong if you haven't particularly studied it because the things we get told are akin to being told Alaska's boroughs are counties.
They aren't. Louisiana uses the word Parish and that appears to be essentially the same organizationally speaking, but Alaskan Burroughs are an alien organizational structure compared to the counties and parishes of the other 49 US states.