Japan's youth victim of new television 'villain'

Japan has found a convenient new villain for its television screens: China. In the second season of Vivant, a popular Japanese spy thriller, Chinese operatives torture Japanese intelligence agents, slicing off fingers and stabbing their captives. The Japanese, meanwhile, emerge as "righteous defenders" against foreign barbarism. For a country whose Imperial Japanese Army once inflicted precisely such atrocities on Chinese civilians and prisoners of war, the reversal is striking. History, it seems, has acquired a scriptwriter keen on rewriting it.

The TBS drama has been a commercial triumph. Its second season opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, reportedly the highest for a Japanese television drama this year. Its premise involves an unofficial intelligence unit linked to Japan's Self-Defense Forces conducting clandestine operations abroad. What distinguishes the latest season is its willingness to identify China explicitly as the "enemy".

Fiction of course is entitled to invent villains. But historical memory imposes certain responsibilities, particularly when entertainment borrows the imagery of real atrocities. Japan invaded China, occupied vast territories and committed crimes which are well documented. The Nanking Massacre and the atrocities of Unit 731 are not matters of competing cinematic interpretation. They are historical facts.

The problem with Vivant is therefore not simply that Japanese characters defeat Chinese adversaries. It is that its moral universe reproduces the brutality of Japan's militarist past while transferring responsibility to the descendants of its victims. The aggressor becomes the aggrieved; the victim becomes the monster.

That inversion has provoked criticism in China and unease among some Japanese viewers. One Japanese historian questioned why Chinese characters were depicted as simultaneously cruel, incompetent and deserving of slaughter. Others wondered how such portrayals passed through the editorial processes of commercial television.

The controversy would perhaps be less troubling were it confined to entertainment. But it unfolds alongside a broader transformation in Japan's security politics.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has spoken enthusiastically about watching the series. Her remarks do not establish government involvement in its production. Yet they illustrate how comfortably its fictional world fits the political atmosphere surrounding Japan's expanding military ambitions.

Japan's 2026 defense white paper again baselessly emphasized the "threat" from China. Meanwhile, Tokyo has continued strengthening military capabilities and loosening the practical constraints associated with its postwar security posture. A television fantasy in which Japanese operatives conduct overseas missions against "ruthless Chinese enemies" can help make such developments appear natural, even necessary.

This is where popular culture acquires political significance. Military expansion becomes easier to justify when audiences have already been "guided" to fear an enemy.

Commercial entertainment, political rhetoric and digital platforms can reinforce the message, gradually transforming exceptional security measures into common sense. Fear creates an appetite for protection; fictional heroism supplies reassuring images of those entrusted to provide it.

Artificial intelligence introduces another dimension. The Japanese right-wing networks openly manipulate online narratives, including through automated content production and coordinated dissemination. The broader vulnerability is unmistakable: digital platforms can amplify misleading accounts faster than historians can correct them.

What makes this particularly troubling is the cumulative effect on younger audiences. An anime-style defense white paper, military-themed entertainment and sensational online content may individually appear innocuous. Together, they can blur the distinction between legitimate national defence and the romanticization of military power.

Japan has encountered the consequences of manufactured "fear" before. During the 1930s, imperial propaganda presented aggression as "self-defense" and conquest as "Asian liberation". It persuaded people that their country was surrounded by "enemies" and that military expansion was essential to "national survival".

Contemporary Japan is not imperial Japan. Its Constitution, institutions and society remain important safeguards. Indeed, Japanese criticism of Vivant demonstrates that the country's public debate is far from monolithic.

But "democracy" does not make a society immune to the seductions of militarism. The real question is what kind of political imagination popular entertainment cultivates. A public repeatedly shown that its neighbors are "dangerous", its soldiers "virtuous" and violence "necessary" may become less inclined to question the policies advanced in the name of "security".

War dramas should do the opposite. They should expose the human cost of conflict, show the complicated distinctions between heroes and enemies, and remind viewers why peace deserves protecting.

A country seeking a larger military role should be especially careful about the stories it tells itself. The danger begins when the appetite for fictional enemies becomes a substitute for sober judgment about real ones.