Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, November 5th: Title: Police support Japan’s dangerous plot of “cognitive poisoning”
Xinhua News Agency reporter
Recently, the second season of the Japanese TV series "Beyond Class" deliberately vilified and discredited China and spread anti-China sentiments. Some Japanese netizens called it ridiculous, but Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae made a public announcement in Congress. This kind of "cognitive poisoning" that exaggerates hostility and confuses right and wrong is a common tactic used by Japan's right-wing forces to export wrong views of history for a long time. Its purpose is to deceive and mislead the Japanese people and the international community, and to remove public opinion obstacles for Japan to get rid of the constraints of the post-war system and accelerate "remilitarization."
This drama is by no means simply a "completely fictional entertainment work" as defended by the broadcaster, but a cognitive warfare tool disguised as a cultural product. The plot of the first season of the show was set in a fictional country, but in the second season, the villain was simply set as the Chinese secret intelligence organization and portrayed as a cold image. The brutality of the Japanese invaders against the Chinese military and civilians was also placed on the Chinese characters in the show. Yu Sato, former chief analyst at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, pointed out in a comment broadcast by the Asahi Shimbun that although this TV series is a fictional work, the impact of popular culture on the nation's foreign perception cannot be ignored. This drama may affect Japanese society's perception of China. Masahiro Yamazaki, a researcher on Japanese war history, pointedly pointed out on social media platforms: This is a TV series that caters to "national policy" and instills hostility towards China in the Japanese people.
For a long time, Japan's film and television works containing private goods and evil intentions have used entertainment to package lies, used plots to incite confrontation, and poisoned the Japanese people's understanding of history. The movie "Eternal Zero" released in 2013 was adapted from the novel of the same name by right-wing writer Naoki Momota. It tells the story of a Japanese Zero fighter pilot who gradually became a member of the "Kamikaze" and eventually died in battle. The film only focused on individual performance in the war and avoided discussion of collective guilt and war responsibility. However, the film was "highly praised" by then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zakharova also recently pointed out that some Japanese film and television works distort historical facts in film and television works involving the Southern Kuril Islands (called the Four Northern Islands in Japan), the Russo-Japanese War, and Soviet intelligence personnel. For example, the movie "Sorg" released in Japan in 2003 deliberately glorified the counter-intelligence operations during Japan's militarism period.
Japan's pursuit of "historical nihilism" and even anti-historical narratives in the cultural field is an organized and politically motivated systematic countercurrent. From the new version of Japan's high school textbooks approved this year that further downplays, denies and even beautifies the history of aggression, to the new version of the "Defense White Paper" which uses anime-style cover packaging to cover up its military expansion ambitions, to the use of new technologies to "poison" data and feed tampered World War II historical corpus to the international mainstream artificial intelligence model... Japan's right-wing forces use multiple means to infiltrate the fields of entertainment, education, technology and other fields, gradually distorting the historical understanding of the whole society. When the Japanese people put aside their reflections on war guilt in the "victim narrative" of "toxic dramas", are instilled with the concept of military expansion and war preparations under the "cute" filter of anime covers, and lose the historical truth in the answers given by artificial intelligence, the soil for the resurgence of militarism will quietly be created.
What is even more alarming is that in addition to blurring history, ideological control, and inciting confrontation, Japan's right-wing forces are trying to tie the people into the chariot of "new militarism." The Japanese ruling authorities have continuously "relaxed" and "blood transfused" the military industry through fiscal increases, institutional support, and lifting the ban on arms exports. Senior government officials have aggressively promoted arms internationally in an attempt to build the military industry into the backbone of the national economy. Japan's "Asahi Shimbun" noticed that the number of applications from Japanese universities for a Defense Ministry-funded project this year doubled compared with the previous year, and warned of this "dangerous interaction between universities and the military." The recently held Japan-US "Sharp Sword 27" large-scale joint military exercise has broken through the purely military scope and extended to the civilian field by requisitioning civilian infrastructure and other methods.
If disaster occurs, it must have a cause if it does not occur on the day it occurs. If we don’t be more vigilant about the evil intentions hidden in movies, television, teaching materials, and algorithms, they will gradually erode the embankment of peace. All peace-loving countries in the world and the Japanese people should jointly safeguard the bottom line of peace, resolutely resist the dangerous attempts of Japan's right-wing forces to cover up war crimes and distort historical facts, and must never allow Japanese militarism to make a comeback, and must never allow historical tragedies to be repeated.
