CCTV Takes On a Hit Japanese Drama Over Who Gets to Play the Torturer
China's state broadcaster has published an unusually detailed attack on *Vivant*, TBS's top-rated thriller, accusing it of dressing Japanese wartime atrocities as modern Chinese crimes while burnishing the image of Japan's Self-Defence Forces. The feud has made the drama a test of how history is told in fiction.
China's state broadcaster has picked a fight with a Japanese television drama, and the argument is about who gets to tell which atrocities.
On Sunday morning, CCTV News published an unusually long on-air commentary against Vivant, the TBS thriller that has topped Japanese ratings since July. The complaint is specific: the second season shows Chinese interrogators performing finger-severing and abdominal-puncture torture on Japanese intelligence officers — methods, the commentary notes, that historical record attributes to the Imperial Japanese Army against Chinese resistance fighters during the occupation. The drama then, in CCTV's phrase, "blackens and grafts" those crimes onto modern Chinese characters, while presenting Japan's overseas operations and the blurred mandate of its Self-Defence Forces in a flattering light. One scene, in which a Self-Defence Forces agent flying out of danger threatens that any attack on his plane would bring "the West crushing down on you," drew particular anger.
The commentary went further than the show. It framed the series as part of a "systemic narrative project" — foreign-ministry spending on China-facing media, AI-generated videos that alter historical footage, textbook revisions — and argued that "hostility in entertainment packaging is more dangerous than naked propaganda." The post drew tens of thousands of likes within hours, and the hashtag #日剧Vivant抹黑中国# (#JapaneseDramaVivantSmearsChina#) sat near the top of the trend board all day.
There is a political edge that Chinese commentary has not missed: the drama is reported to be a favourite of Japan's new prime minister, Takaichi Sanae, who publicly "named" it as one she wanted to watch. Its second season premiered while China-Japan relations are passing through one of their periodic confrontations over history — the same week that Japan's leaders were marking the war's end differently from their neighbours.
The collision lands differently from the usual drama controversy because Vivant is, by genre conventions, an entertainment thriller with a charismatic lead — Masato Sakai plays a mid-level bureaucrat who stumbles into a covert government unit — not a historical war film. Chinese viewers who watched the first season for its production values now find the show's villain map redrawn around them. As one popular commentary put it, "Sakai Masato is finished" (堺雅人要凉了) — meaning his Chinese audience, long the largest overseas market for Japanese dramas, has little reason to return.
What the state broadcaster's intervention also signals is the direction of the argument: China is no longer merely protesting how textbooks describe the occupation; it is now policing how modern fiction assigns the role of torturer. Whether Vivant's writers intended the inversion or simply wrote villains without checking the history, the reading in China — encouraged from the top of the media system — is that a Japanese drama has moved Japan's wartime crimes into a Chinese present.