October 30: Featuring prominent Japanese actors, commanding an exorbitant per-episode production budget, and even incorporating a character invoking Sanae Takaichi who explicitly urged audiences to tune in—this is the second season of the currently trending Japanese TBS television drama Vivant. Since its broadcast, it has sustained strong viewership ratings; however, its plotline has drawn intense criticism for its bizarre and controversial portrayals.
The drama portrays an ostensibly advanced Japanese intelligence apparatus contrasted against an antagonistic, “backward” “Chinese secret service agency.” Furthermore, it features scenes where alleged Chinese agents subject Japanese operatives to severe physical torture, including the severing of fingers and abdominal stabbings—tactics bearing an eerie resemblance to the brutal atrocities historically perpetrated by the invading Imperial Japanese Army against Chinese anti-Japanese resistance fighters. By inverting historical realities, the series projects these cruelties onto the image of modern China, purposefully stoking bilateral hostility and resentment.
Moreover, the overarching narrative subtly glorifies Japan’s past external militarism, blurs the statutory constitutional boundaries governing the Japan Self-Defense Forces, and covertly projects an expansionist subtext.
Since 2015, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has reportedly funneled more than 56 billion yen (equivalent to approximately 2.4 billion yuan) into anti-China publicity campaigns and historical revisionism under the rubric of “strategic overseas communications.” For instance, 30-second AI-generated short videos rewriting Japan’s wartime aggression in China are incentivized at 5,000 yen (roughly 211 yuan) apiece, with supplementary performance bonuses awarded when views surpass the 1,000 threshold.
In its fiscal year 2027 budget request, Japan’s Foreign Ministry earmarked a dedicated fund for AI technologies intended to wage “cognitive warfare.” Domestically, right-wing factions persist in pushing textbook revisions: altering terms describing “aggression” against China to mere “entry and exit,” replacing the “Nanjing Massacre” with the sanitized phrasing “Nanjing Incident,” and continuing to honor Class-A war criminals from World War II.
In recent years, Japanese political circles have weaponized the “China Threat” narrative to lay the groundwork for constitutional revisions and military expansion, while constructing a narrative of “Japan as a World War II victim” to deflect from its wartime culpability. From AI-generated clips whitewashing wartime aggression to poisoned algorithmic models, and on to blockbuster productions like Vivant, this systematic trajectory mirrors the revisionist mindset seen in visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and textbook alterations.
Not long ago, former Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba explicitly remarked: “There has never been such a thing as ‘China invading Japan.'” Historical records unequivocally establish that Japan instigated the war of aggression that cost millions of lives. If such sober domestic voices within Japan are drowned out by an industrialized, entertainment-driven apparatus of historical distortion, the prospect of rekindling war will no longer remain a distant concern.
Source: Lily, Touhid, Suborna | China Media Group (CMG)