On
this date, January 28, 1948, two Japanese Sub Lieutenant, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda
Tsuyoshi were executed by firing squad in Yuhuatai for their mass murdering
spree during the Battle of Nanking in December 1937. I will post information
about them from Wikipedia and other links.
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The December 13, 1937 article in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun's Contest to
kill 100 people using a sword series. Mukai (left) and Noda (right)
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The
contest to kill 100 people using a sword (百人斬り競争
hyakunin-giri kyōsō?) is a wartime account of a contest
between two Japanese Army officers during the Japanese invasion of China over
which of them could first kill 100 people with his sword. The two officers were
later executed on war crimes charges for their involvement. Since that time,
the historicity of the event has been hotly contested, often by Japanese
nationalists or revisionist historians seeking to invalidate the historiography
of the Nanking Massacre.
The
issue first emerged from a series of wartime Japanese-language newspaper
articles, which celebrated the "heroic" killing of Chinese by two
Japanese officers, who were engaged in a competition to see who could kill the
most first. The issue was revived in the 1970s and sparked a larger controversy
over Japanese war crimes in China, and in particular the Nanking Massacre.
The
original newspaper accounts described the killings as hand-to-hand combat;
historians have suggested that they were more likely just another part of the
widespread mass killings of defenseless prisoners.
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Contest to kill 100 people using a sword
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Wartime accounts
In
1937, the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and its sister newspaper 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 13), they decided to begin another contest,
with the aim being 150 kills. The Nichi Nichi headline of the story of
December 13 read "'Incredible Record' [in the Contest to] Behead 100
People—Mukai 106 – 105 Noda—Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings".
Other
soldiers and historians have noted the unlikelihood of the lieutenants' alleged
heroics, which entailed killing enemy after enemy in fierce hand-to-hand
combat. Noda himself, on returning to his hometown, admitted during a speech,
Actually, I didn't kill more than four or five people in hand-to hand combat... We'd face an enemy trench that we'd captured, and when we called out, 'Ni, Lai-Lai!' (You, come on!), the Chinese soldiers were so stupid, they'd rush toward us all at once. Then we'd line them up and cut them down, from one end of the line to the other. I was praised for having killed a hundred people, but actually, almost all of them were killed in this way. The two of us did have a contest, but afterward, I was often asked whether it was a big deal, and I said it was no big deal...
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Tsuyoshi Noda and Toshiaki Mukai
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Tsuyoshi Noda, the loser of the Contest to
Cut Down 100 People (105 persons). Photo taken in December, 1937.
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Trial and execution
After
the war, a written record 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, tried by the Nanjing War
Crimes Tribunal, convicted of atrocities committed during the Battle
of Nanking and the subsequent massacre, and on January 28, 1948, both soldiers
were executed at Yuhuatai execution chamber by the Chinese government.
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Two Second Lieutenants in the 9th Infantry
Regiment of the 16th Division, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, who were tried
in Nanking. (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.nankingatrocities.net/Tribunals/nanjing_02.htm)
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Postwar accounts
See
also: Historiography of the Nanking
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 journalist Katsuichi
Honda brought the issue to the attention of the public with a series of articles
written for Asahi Shimbun, which focused on interviews with Chinese
survivors of the World War II occupation and massacres.
In
Japan, the articles sparked fierce debate about the Nanking Massacre, with the
veracity of the killing contest a particularly contentious point of debate.
Over the following years several authors argued the case over whether the
Nanking Massacre even occurred, with viewpoints on the subject also being a
predictor for whether they believed the contest was a fabrication.
In
a later work, Katsuichi Honda placed the account of the killing contest in the
context of its effect on Imperial Japanese forces in China. In one instance,
Honda notes Japanese veteran Shintaro Uno's autobiographical description of the
effect on his sword of consecutively beheading nine prisoners. Uno compares his
experiences with those of the two lieutenants from the killing contest.
Although he had believed the inspirational tales of hand-to-hand combat in his
youth, after his own experience in the war he came to believe the killings were
more likely executions. Shintaro adds,
Whatever
you say, it's silly to argue about whether it happened this way or that way
when the situation is clear. There were hundreds and thousands of [soldiers
like Mukai and Noda], including me, during those fifty years of war between
Japan and China. At any rate, it was nothing more than a commonplace occurrence
during the so-called Chinese Disturbance.
In
2000, Bob Wakabayashi wrote that "the killing contest itself was a fabrication",
but the controversy it created "increased the Japanese people's knowledge
of the Atrocity and raised their awareness of being victimizers in a war of
imperialist aggression despite efforts to the contrary by conservative
revisionists." Joshua Fogel has stated that to accept the newspaper
account "as true and accurate requires a leap of faith that no balanced
historian can make."
The
Nanking Massacre Memorial in China
includes a display on the contest among its many exhibits. A Japan Times
article has suggested that its presence allows revisionists to "sow seeds
of doubt" about the accuracy of the entire collection.
One
of the swords allegedly used in the contest is on display at the Republic of
China Armed Forces Museum in Taipei, Taiwan.
The
contest is depicted in the 1994 film Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, as
well as the 2009 film, John Rabe.
Lawsuit
In
April 2003, the families of Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda filed a defamation
suit against Katsuichi Honda, Kashiwa Shobō, the Asahi
Shimbun, and the Mainichi Shimbun, requesting ¥36,000,000 (approx.
US$300,000 in 2003) in compensation. On August 23, 2005, Tokyo District Court
Judge Akio Doi dismissed the suit on the grounds that "[the contest] did
occur, and was not fabricated by the media". The judge stated that,
although the original newspaper article included "false elements",
the officers admitted that they had raced to kill 100 people and "it is
difficult to say it was fiction."
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Tsuyoshi Noda 1912-1948
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Toshiaki Mukai 1912-1948
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INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.nankingatrocities.net/Tribunals/nanjing_02.htm
Trial
of the Nanking Atrocities
Along
with the major Japanese governmental and military leaders indicted for Class-A
war crimes, some 5,700 other Japanese (168) were tried for Class
B and C war crimes by the Allied nations in Yokohama, Singapore, Rabaul,
Batavia, Manila, Nanjing and numerous other venues. (169)
China
established 13 tribunals, tried 650 cases, convicted 504 Japanese and sentenced
149 to death.
In
Nanjing, presumably due to the difficulties in investigating atrocities that
had happened more than 8 years earlier while caught up in the Civil War against
the Communists, only four Japanese army officers were tried for the war crimes
relating to the Nanking Atrocities between 1946 and 1947.
The
accused were the commander of the 6th Division, Lieutenant General Tani Hisao,
the company commander of the 6th Division, Captain Tanaka Gunkichi, and two
Second Lieutenants in the 9th Infantry Regiment of the 16th Division, Mukai
Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi. Among the four defendants, Tani was the only one
who was in a high commanding position when the city fell.
Of
other possible suspects, General Matsui Iwane, the commander-in-chief of the
Central China Area Army, was being tried at the International Military Tribunal
for the Far East as a Class-A war crime suspect.
Lieutenant
General Nakajima Kesago, the commander of the 16th Division and Lieutenant
General Yanagawa Heisuke, the commander of the 10th Army, both died in 1945.
Lieutenant
General Prince Asaka, the commander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and
Emperor Hirohito's uncle, was granted immunity for any war crimes trial because
of his lineage as a member of the royal family.
And
finally, Lieutenant Colonel Cho Isamu, an information staff officer of the
Shanghai Expeditionary Force and a general staff of the CCAA, committed suicide
in Okinawa before the Pacific War ended. (170)
Thus,
Tani was the only one alive and available. In court he pleaded not guilty and
indicated Nakajima and his troops were the real culprits, but the mounting
evidence adduced against him and the testimonies of eyewitnesses and victims
showed otherwise.
He
was found guilty on February 6, 1947 and the court pronounced the sentence of
death on March 10, which read:
Hisao Tani, having been convicted of instigating, inspiring and encouraging during the war the men under his command to stage general massacres of prisoners of war and non-combatants and to perpetrate such crimes as rape, plunder and wanton destruction of property, is hereby sentenced to death.
On
April 26 he was sent before the firing squad at Yuhuatai execution site. (171)
The
other three were brought to Nanking thanks to the domestic propaganda activity
of the Japanese government during the wartime.
Tanaka
was once mentioned in a book called Imperial Soldiers in Japan and became
famous for killing "300 hateful Chinese enemies" with his "buddy
sword" Sukehiro.
Mukai
and Noda were also well known for their killing contest to cut down a hundred
Chinese soldiers in combat with their swords on the way to Nanking. Their story
was serially published in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspaper, where the two
second lieutenants were treated as war heroes (to read some of the articles in
English, see Reference
below).
However,
as many historians point out today, the stories of hyped heroism, in which
those soldiers courageously killed a number of enemies in hand-to-hand combat
with swords, couldn't be taken at face value. (172)
Indeed,
when Noda came back to his hometown in Japan and made a speech at an elementary
school, he told his young audience that of more than a hundred Chinese soldiers
he killed, most were actually prisoners of war.
In
1971 one of the schoolchildren, Shishime Akira, wrote to a magazine of what he
heard from Noda years before, a part of which quoted the second lieutenant as
saying:
I killed only four or five with sword in the real combat.... After we captured an enemy trench, we'd tell them, "Ni Lai Lai." The Chinese soldiers were stupid enough to come out the trench toward us one after another. We'd line them up and cut them down from one end to the other. (173)
As
if representing the hundreds of other "great swordsmen" in the
Imperial Army of Japan who severed the heads of unresisting Chinese captives,
Tanaka, Mukai and Noda were all sentenced to death and executed on January 28,
1948.
Interview:
Fujiwara Akira (174)
Fujiwara
Akira is a professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University. He has published a
number of books on the Imperial Army's wartime atrocities in Asia. He is
considered one of Japan's most prominent scholars on the Nanking Atrocities
today.
"I
think the Tokyo War Crimes Trial has a tremendous significance in our history
in the sense that it meted out justice for Japan's aggression for the first
time. The trial collected abundant historical evidence in a relatively short
period of time as well, which is a treasure house of materials for even today's
researchers...."
"Yes,
it [the IMTFE] has its own limitations and problems. The United States
intentionally overlooked the experiments on human guinea pigs and poisonous gas
experiments done by the Japanese troops in an exchange for the scientific data.
The trial did not delve into all the battles and atrocities in all of China.
They only chose a couple of them as symbolic incidents, such as the Rape of
Nanjing and the one in Manila. But the Imperial Army massacred far more people
all over China than in Nanjing alone. The trial also granted immunity to the
Emperor and Prince Asaka [the commander-in-chief of the Shanghai Expeditionary
Force]. There were some aspects that were problematic...."
"I
would say Matsui [the commander-in-chief of the Central China Area Army] was
far more responsible [for the Nanking Atrocities] than Prince Asaka was. After
all, Matsui was his superior officer who had been in charge of the Central
China theater. Prince Asaka was appointed in December and arrived China on the
7th. Of course, there is no doubt that he should have been tried, though...."
"The
problem of the Class B and C war crimes trials in China was that another civil
war was going on between the Nationalists and the Communists. I guess they
didn't have much time and manpower for the trial in Nanjing. In that sense,
probably the Tokyo Trial was more thorough and systematic. I am also aware of
the argument that the Second Lieutenant officers [who initiated the contest to
cut down 100 Chinese soldiers with their swords] tried in the Nanjing War
Crimes Tribunal were innocent. But the current argument lacks the context. They
might not have been guilty as charged [for killing more than 100 Chinese in
hand-to-hand combat] but I am almost certain that they beheaded many [Chinese
prisoners of war]...."
- Richard H. Minear, Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), 6.
- Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945-1951 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 33 and173.
- Fujiwara, “‘Tokyo Saiban ni yoru Dechiage’ Setsu koso ga Dechiage [The Theory of ‘Fabrication at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial’ Is the Real Fabrication], 23-24; Kasahara, Nanking Jiken [The Nanjing Incident], 6-8; Hata, Nanking Jiken [The Nanjing Incident], 46-47; Frank Gibney, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Katsuichi Honda, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame, ed. Frank Gibney, trans. Karen Sandness (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), xxi, n2.
- Hata, 48-49; Piccigallo, 165-166.
- The three researchers interviewed by author for this project, Daqing Yang, Ikuhiko Hata, and Akira Fujiwara said that the contest could have been mere mass murder of prisoners.
- Quoted in Katsuichi Honda, Nanking he no Michi [The Road to Nanjing], 162-163.
- Akira Fujiwara, interview by author, Tokyo, Japan, 25 February 2000.
- To read some of the articles on the killing contest, see Reference: Articles on the Killing Contest below.
- To read the judgment of the IMTFE on the Rape of Nanking, Matsui Iwane and Hirota Koki, go to The Postwar Judgment (Reference): The Judgment of the IMTFE.
- To see a collection of photographs taken at the IMTFE, click here.
SUB-LIEUTENANTS IN RACE TO FELL 100 CHINESE RUNNING CLOSE CONTEST
Sub-lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Sub-lieutenant Takeshi Noda, both of the Katagiri unit at Kuyung, in a friendly contest to see "which of them will first fell 100 Chinese in individual sword combat before the Japanese forces completely occupy Nanking are well in the final phase of their race, running almost neck to neck.
On Sunday when their unit was fighting outside Kuyung, the "score," according to the Asahi, was: Sub-lieutenant Mukai, 89, and Sub-lieutenant Noda, 78.
CONTEST TO KILL FIRST 100 CHINESE WITH SWORD EXTENDED WHEN BOTH FIGHTERS EXCEED MARK
The winner of the competition between Sub-Lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Sub-Lieutenant lwao [Takeshi] Noda to see who would be the first to kill 100 Chinese with his Yamato sword has not been decided, the Nichi Nichi reports from the slopes of Purple Mountain, outside Nanking.
Mukai has a score of 106 and his rival has dispatched 105 men, but the two contestants have found it impossible to determine which passed the 100 mark first. Instead of settling it with a discussion, they are going to extend the goal by 50.
Mukai's blade was slightly damaged in the competition. He explained that this was the result of cutting a Chinese in half, helmet and all. The contest was "fun," he declared, and he thought it a good thing that both men had gone over the 100 mark without knowing that the other had done so.
Early Saturday morning, when the Nichi Nichi man interviewed the sub-lieutenant at a point overlooking Dr. Sun Yat-sen's tomb, another Japanese unit set fire to the slopes of Purple Mountain in an attempt to drive out the Chinese troops.
The action also smoked out Sub-Lieutenant Mukai and his unit, and the men stood idly by while bullets passed overhead. "Not a shot hits me while I am holding this sword on my shoulder," he explained confidently.
- To read the judgment of the IMTFE on the Rape of Nanking, Matsui Iwane and Hirota Koki, go to The Postwar Judgment (Reference): The Judgment of the IMTFE.
- To see a collection of photographs taken at the IMTFE, click here.
- To continue reading the story, go to The Nanking Atrocities in the 1990s: The Death Toll - Early Estimates.
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