Criticism of the TBS drama VIVANT by Chinese state media has led Sanrio to cancel merchandise tied to the show, including goods meant to be sold in Japan to Japanese buyers, the commentator Shirakawa Tsukasa wrote.
Shirakawa called the outcome a "new China risk": Japanese entertainment companies and private firms drawn into a political information war and taking real business losses. He made the argument in an article carried by Yahoo! News Japan.
On October 25, media affiliated with China Central Television criticized the drama. The next day, the Global Times, part of the People's Daily group, accused the show of slandering China and exaggerating the China threat.
Several outlets belonging to the Communist Party's propaganda system have made the drama a political target. They link it to Japan's defense policy and to the stance of Prime Minister Takaichi, arguing the show justifies an expanded Japanese military role. China, in other words, reads the drama as an attack by Japan in a cognitive war between the two countries.
A torture scene at the center
VIVANT is an entertainment drama. Its first season aired in 2023, and a second season began in July 2026. Sakai Masato plays Nogi Yusuke, a trading company employee who is in fact a member of a covert, unofficial Self-Defense Forces intelligence unit.
In the second season, a Chinese intelligence organization detains a member of the Japanese unit and subjects him to brutal torture, including cutting off his fingers. That scene is what Chinese outlets seized on.
The Global Times argued that the torture resembles what the old Japanese military did to Chinese resistance activists. It claimed the drama recasts Japan, history's perpetrator, as the victim, and China as the aggressor.
The criticism has an obvious weakness. VIVANT is not a historical drama about the war between Japan and China. It is fiction set in the present, about secret intelligence organizations fighting behind the scenes of the state.