The point I was making was that even Japanese films produced during the Sino-Japanese War, for example by Akira Kurosawa, did not present the Chinese as villains. In fact, the Chinese hardly appear in them at all; the films concentrate on presenting the lives of Japanese soldiers.
Nor do Japanese films produced since 1945 present the Chinese as villains.
One film I saw that does portray the Chinese of 1927 as violent fanatics was the American film "The Sand Pebbles", produced in 1966 and starring the late Steve McQueen. It tells the story of the crew of a US Navy gunboat, the fictional USS San Pablo, stationed at Changsha, deep in the interior of China, on a tributary of the Chang Jiang.
At first the relations of the US Navy crew with the local Chinese people are friendly. That however changes when Guomindang forces arrive in the area, and they and local student radicals stir the people up to attack the American sailors.
There is one particularly gruesome scene where some Chinese soldiers capture a Chinese man who has been working on the USN gunboat as a mechanic; they string him up on the shore, in sight of the gunboat and begin to skin him alive. The Chinese man being skinned screams repeatedly to the crew of the boat to shoot him and end his suffering; eventually the Steve McQueen character picks up a rifle and shoots him from the boat.
After that, the Chinese revolutionaries accuse the USN crew of having murdered an innocent Chinese, and begin to lay siege to the gunboat, which is stranded during the winter because of low water. When the water level rises in spring, the gunboat tries to escape, but is trapped by a cordon of boats manned by Guomindang soldiers and student radicals. A battle ensues in which the US sailors manage to fight their way through and escape, but only after many are killed on both sides.
The portrayal of the Chinese characters is variable. In the mass, they are shown as volatile, sometimes friendly but easily stirred to violence. Some of the individual Chinese are portrayed as evil, for example, the official translator for the gunboat, a Confucian scholar, is a very devious character, pretending to be friendly but actually in league with the revolutionaries.
In the other hand, the leader of the student radicals is portrayed sympathetically as an idealist, who befriends the Steve McQueen character. Even so, at the end he joins the soldiers manning the cordon of boats that is trying to prevent the gunboat escaping, and in the ensuing battle the McQueen character kills him by chopping him in the stomach with an axe.
Paradoxically, that film, which painted a very negative picture of the Guomindang in 1927, was filmed in Taiwan, which was then still under the dictatorship of Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang. One is left wondering why the Taiwanese authorities gave permission for the film to be shot in their country. Perhaps they reasoned that the Chinese revolutionaries portrayed in the film were actually dastardly Communists, who were later purged by Jiang.
I do not know of any Japanese mainstream film that is the equivalent of "The Sand Pebbles", portraying Chinese as violently fanatical revolutionaries.
By the way, this is the blurb for the movie "The Sand Pebbles":
This is the heroic story of the men on the USS San Pablo who disturbed the sleeping dragon of savage China as a threatened world watched in breathless terror.
Those are words produced by the advertising industry of the United States in 1966, when the Vietnam War was raging and China was viewed as a dangerous enemy.
I do not know of any Japanese film that used such expressions.
