Needless provocation? Japanese blockbuster hit Vivant portrays China as a sadistic villain

– The Nov 1 episode of Japanese blockbuster TV drama Vivant opened with an unconventional disclaimer, an attempt to defuse a controversy over the production’s portrayal of Chinese government agents as ruthless, sadistic torturers.“We have absolutely no intention of promoting violence or conflict between nations,” read the on-screen notice at the start of the penultimate episode of the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) Sunday flagship series.“This drama is fiction, and has no relation whatsoever to any real people, organisations, events, or historical occurrences. The depictions of countries and regions in the drama are fictional creations,” it said.The high-octane spy thriller is hurtling towards its Nov 8 season finale under a geopolitical cloud of its creators’ own making. The production has triggered fierce condemnation from Beijing while Japanese corporate giant Sanrio, the creators of Hello Kitty, has axed an official merchandise collaboration with the show.This is an unfortunate distraction for a high-budget series that has been extremely entertaining with cinematic scenes filmed overseas including countries like Mongolia and Azerbaijan, labyrinthine plot twists, and an ensemble cast of Japan’s most bankable stars.Tens of millions across Japan tune in every Sunday or catch up via domestic streaming platforms, this correspondent included.Vivant follows Yusuke Nogi (Masato Sakai), a bumbling trading firm salaryman who leads a double life as an elite operative in “Beppan”, a clandestine intelligence outfit buried within the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF). The show’s feverish reception even once prompted Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi to publicly deny the unit’s existence.Nogi works alongside police inspector Mamoru Nozaki (Hiroshi Abe) and Nogi’s foster brother Nokor (Kazunari Ninomiya of defunct boy band Arashi), a leading figure in the enigmatic terrorist syndicate Tent which hails from the fictional Central Asian “Republic of Balka”.Season 1, a 10-part series that aired in 2023 and is currently available globally on Netflix, remained geopolitically neutral within the make-believe Balka.Season 2, which premiered in July and remains unavailable on international streaming platforms, made the fateful leap into contemporary East Asian geopolitics by casting China explicitly as the antagonist. While other real-world nations like Azerbaijan and Thailand also feature in the drama, China is singled out as the hostile power.Was the decision to explicitly name China driven by how Tokyo now routinely names Beijing as its top security threat? Even so, had scriptwriters stopped at merely identifying China as a threat, the drama could have passed as pure fiction.The bone of contention was the scenes of interrogation carried out by fictional Chinese intelligence agency “Xinxi”, featuring captured Japanese agents subjected to graphic brutal torture that includes severing of fingers and stabs to the abdomen. And at least one scene suggests sexual abuse, although this is not explicit and left open to viewer interpretation.While creative liberties must be protected, this should not come with a blank check at the expense of social sensitivities. It is here that Vivant crossed out-of-bounds markers and it is therefore unsurprising that Beijing has reacted with fury, with Chinese state media labelling the drama as “cognitive poisoning” and “cognitive warfare”.One complaint centres on what critics describe as “historical inversion”, projecting torture methods historically inflicted by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II – not just in China, but also across the Korean Peninsula and South-east Asia – onto modern-day Chinese figures. This grievance is justified, when seen against how Japanese history education tends to gloss over Japan’s wartime atrocities even while acknowledging the country’s role as an aggressor that lost the war. Might the scriptwriters simply have been unaware of how close their fiction comes to historical reality?Many Japanese netizens also accuse Beijing of double standards, pointing to Chinese “hypocrisy” given that China’s state-backed film industry routinely churns out patriotic blockbusters and anti-Japanese war epics. These include Unit 731 (2025), which graphically detailed the Imperial Japanese Army’s biological experimentation in Harbin.Yet, no matter where one stands on WWII history, dramatising a war that ended 81 years ago with characters of a bygone era differs from portraying a contemporary neighbour as an active threat devoid of moral restraint.The diplomatic fallout prompted TBS President Masamine Ryuho to emphasise at an Oct 28 news conference that Vivant is a “completely fictitious entertainment work” with “no intention of disparaging any specific country or hurting national sentiment”, adding that the broadcaster does not want to stoke international enmity.China was unconvinced. A day later, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a regular press briefing: “This television drama once again reveals the persistent existence inside Japan of a force that seeks to use cultural products to vilify and smear China and spread anti-Chinese sentiment.”Even an offhand remark by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, under whom bilateral ties have chilled following her November 2025 statement in Parliament suggesting JSDF mobilisation if China should invade the self-ruling Taiwan, became entangled in the dispute.Takaichi had told a parliamentary committee on Oct 14 that she was recording weekly episodes of Vivant hoping to binge-watch them over the year-end holidays.Beijing would come to seize upon this remark as high-level endorsement for “anti-China propaganda”.The corporate fallout followed, with Sanrio scrapping its merchandise collaboration and the company’s Shanghai subsidiary apologising on Weibo, stating that the drama contained expressions “inconsistent with our corporate philosophy” of harmony and peace.It is easy to view Beijing’s outrage as calculated political theatre, given its own track record of state-backed patriotic cinema.Moreover, as Daito Bunka University professor Tsuyoshi Nojima noted on news aggregator site NewsPicks, Vivant’s portrayal of Chinese intelligence is hardly a masterclass in sinister propaganda. Naming a top-secret spy agency “Xinxi”, literally the Chinese word for “information”, is laughably unsubtle. Furthermore, casting Japanese actors as elite Chinese spooks and having them deliver heavily accented Mandarin, which I found difficult to understand without subtitles, immediately shatters any sense of realism.Yet pop culture does not exist in a geopolitical vacuum. Former diplomat Masaru Sato cautioned in the Asahi Shimbun that even in fiction, “the impact of subculture on public perception of foreign affairs cannot be ignored”.Spy fiction thrives on high-stakes conflict, and every espionage thriller needs an adversary. But casting a real-life, close neighbour as a brutal torturer was entirely avoidable.Had the antagonists remained rooted in an imaginary realm, or even been styled as a rogue syndicate rather than a state-backed agency, Vivant could have delivered suspense without throwing to the wind geopolitical common sense.