Contest To Cut Down 100 People

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Contest To Cut Down 100 People was an event that occurred in China during the Nanking Massacre.

In 1937, the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun covered a "contest" between two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, in which the two men vied to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword. The competition took place en route to Nanjing, directly prior to the infamous "Nanjing Massacre".

Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. Therefore, they decided to begin another contest, this time, continuing to 150 kills.[1] The Nichi Nichi headline pertaining to the event read "'Incredible Record' [in the Contest to] Cut Down 100 People—Mukai 106 – 105 Noda—Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings".

The news coverage of the event found their 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 Nanjing 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 Nanjing. The story was ignored by the elitist 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 Nanjing Massacre, with the veracity of the killing contest a particularly contentious point of debate. Honda published a book about Nanjing and the contest in 1981.

Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, who, in 2000, undertook one of the most comprehensive studies of the incident ever conducted, reached the conclusion that "the killing contest itself was a fabricated story", but served as positive influence in Japanese culture, making the Japanese more aware of some of the wartime atrocities that had actually been conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army.

In April of 2003, the families of Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda filed a defamation suit in a Tokyo District Court against Katsuichi Honda and the Mainichi Shimbun, requesting ¥36,000,000 in compensation. On August 23, 2005, the court, presided over by Judge Akio Doi, ruled against the plaintiffs, saying that the statute of limitations for the defamation claims had already expired. The judge further found that the allegations of defamation were difficult to prove, in light of the numerous incriminating comments allegedly made by the soldiers themselves.

[edit] Further reading

John B. Powell, "My Twenty-five Years in China", New York, The Macmillan Company, 1945. pp.305 – 308.
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, "The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate: War Guilt Amid Fabricated Illusions, 1971 – 75",The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol.26 No.2 Summer 2000. [2]