Featuring well-known Japanese actors and a hefty production budget for each episode, the second season of Vivant, currently airing on Japan's TBS, is a hit that Sanae Takaichi has specifically said she wants to watch. The series has maintained high ratings since its premiere, but its plot is utterly implausible.
The series depicts a present-day "Chinese secret organization" as "backward," contrasting it with Japan's advanced intelligence agency. It also features scenes in which Chinese intelligence operatives cut off the fingers of Japanese operatives and stab them in the abdomen—methods closely resembling the torture inflicted by Japanese forces during their invasion of China on Chinese patriots who resisted them. By grafting such acts to contemporary Chinese people, the series turns historical reality on its head, deliberately creating confrontation and inciting hostility.
Moreover, the series also subtly glorifies Japan's overseas operations that overstep legitimate bounds, blurs the boundaries of the Japan Self-Defense Forces' functions, and indirectly promotes an expansionist narrative. In one scene, a JSDF intelligence operative fleeing aboard an aircraft even yells at Chinese personnel, "If this plane is attacked, just wait for the West to mobilize in force and crush you..."
The efforts extend beyond television dramas. Since 2015, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has spent more than 56 billion yen (about 2.4 billion yuan) under the guise of "strategic overseas communications" to smear China and distort history. For example, the going rate for producing a 30-second AI-generated video falsifying the history of Japan's aggression against China is 5,000 yen (about 211 yuan), with an additional bonus if it receives more than 1,000 views.
In Japan's FY2027 budget, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also, for the first time, earmarked a separate allocation for AI to "counter cognitive warfare." By using large AI models to spread distorted historical narratives across the internet and engaging in extensive "data poisoning," Japan is turning cognitive warfare into an institutionalized national undertaking. Meanwhile, Japanese right-wing forces continue to push for textbook revisions at home, replacing "aggression against China" with "advancing into China," referring to the "Nanjing Massacre" as the "Nanjing Incident," and glorifying Class-A war criminals from World War II.
In recent years, Japan has fabricated the "China threat" narrative to pave the way for constitutional revision and military expansion, while portraying itself as a victim of World War II to whitewash its role as an aggressor. AI-generated videos falsifying the history of Japan's aggression against China, data poisoning targeting large AI models, and productions such as Vivant all reflect the same view of history that underlies visits to "war criminal shrines" and the distortion of history in textbooks.
A few days ago, former Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba stated a simple truth: "There was no such thing as 'China invading Japan.' It was Japan that started the war, causing tens of millions of deaths." If such voices in Japan are drowned out by lies churned out on an industrialized scale and packaged as entertainment, the prospect of Japan "waging war again" may no longer be just a hypothetical scenario.
Editor's Note: Originally published by CCTV news, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.