After China Central Television, China’s state broadcaster, condemned the Japanese TV series Vivant, which airs on TBS (also its producer), Chinese media outlets criticized the popular series, now in its second season. The show tells the story of Japanese spies protecting their country against China.
In particular, China objected to a scene in which Chinese agents torture Japanese operatives. The People’s Daily, the newspaper of China’s Communist Party, wrote that the series accused China of employing torture methods used by the Japanese army during its invasion of China before World War II.
The controversy reflects the sensitivity surrounding Japan’s wartime record in China. During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Japanese forces committed widespread atrocities against Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. For Beijing, therefore, depicting Chinese agents employing similar methods against Japanese characters amounts to potentially trivializing Japan’s wartime aggression.
TBS, for its part, maintains that the series is entirely fictional and should not be interpreted as a political statement about China or Japan’s wartime history.
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