Contest to kill 100 people using a sword
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The contest to kill 100 people using a sword (百人斬り競争 hyakunin-giri kyōsō?) was a "contest" between two Japanese Army officers during the Japanese invasion of China. The contest was supposedly over which of them would first kill 100 people with his sword. The stories would have lasting repercussions, including the execution of the two officers for war crimes. The issue was revived in the 1970's and sparked a larger controversy over the war-crime actions of the Japanese in China, and in particular over the historicity of the Nanking Massacre.
The newspaper storyIn 1937, the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun covered a "contest" between two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai (向井敏明?) and Tsuyoshi Noda (野田毅?), in which the two men were described as vying with one another to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword. The competition supposedly took place en route to Nanking, directly prior to the infamous "Nanking Massacre" and was covered in four articles, from November 30 to December 13, 1937, the two last being translated in the Japan Advertiser. Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. Therefore (according to the journalists Asami Kazuo and Suzuki Jiro, writing in the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi Shimbun of December 13th), they decided to begin another contest, with the aim being 150 kills.[1] The Nichi Nichi headline of the story of December 13th read "'Incredible Record' [in the Contest to] Behead 100 People—Mukai 106 – 105 Noda—Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings". AftermathThe news coverage of the "contest" found its way into the documents of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Soon after, the two soldiers were extradited to China, and on January 28, 1948, both soldiers were executed at Yuhuatai execution chamber by the Chinese government following trials by a Nanking military court for atrocities committed during the Battle of Nanking and the subsequent massacre. In Japan, the contest was lost to the obscurity of history until 1967, when Tomio Hora, a professor of history at Waseda University, published a 118-page document pertaining to the events of Nanking. The story was unreported by the Japanese press until 1971, when Japanese historian Katsuichi Honda brought the issue to the attention of the public with a series of articles published in the Mainichi Shimbun—the modern-day descendant of the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun. In Japan, the articles sparked ferocious debate about the Nanking Massacre, as some Japanese denied it or aspects of it. Honda published a book about Nanking and the contest in 1981. References
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