18 September 1931. Japan, seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, invades Manchuria -
an industrial area located in Northeastern China known for its rich mineral and coal reserves.
In the following years, there will be various "incidents", or armed clashes of a limited
nature between the Empire of the Rising Sun and the Republic of China but full-scale war will
not break out between the two countries until the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on
7 July 1937. This marks the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War that will end only
with Japan's surrender on 2 September 1945. During this war, which is the prelude to the
Pacific side of World War II, the Japanese army scores major victories, capturing Beijing and
Shanghai and in December of 1937, the Japanese military invades Nanjing, then China’s capital.
In Nanjing, the Japanese soldiers commit unspeakable atrocities and engage in a campaign
of mass killing which over the course of two months will claim the lives of as many as 300,000
civilians and numerous unarmed Chinese soldiers. However, the crimes committed by the Japanese
army are not limited only to the period of two months as many atrocities were reported to have
been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. The most notorious
of these atrocities is an infamous contest between 2 Japanese Army officers over who could behead 100
people the fastest using their sword. Their names are Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda.
Conflict in Asia between Japan and China began with the Invasion of Manchuria,
well before the official start of World War II.
As part of earlier treaty agreements, the Japanese had troops protecting the railroad
in Southern Manchuria. However Japan wanted to expand their control over Chinese Manchuria so
on September 18, 1931 the Japanese planted a small explosive device next to the tracks
owned by Japan's South Manchuria Railroad near the city of Mukden. The explosion that followed became
known as the Mukden incident. Though damage to the railway was minimal, it provided an excuse
for the Japanese for the speedy and unauthorized capture of Mukden, now Shenyang, and to seize all
the cities along the railroad. Despite Chinese opposition, the Japanese continued to advance and
by February 27, 1932, the last Chinese opposing the Japanese were forced to surrender and all of
Manchuria was in Japanese hands. A few days later on the 1 March the Japanese established the puppet
state of Manchukuo which was dissolved only on 18 August 1945 after the Japanese Emperor Hirohito
had announced the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military 3 days earlier.
Since the invasion of Manchuria, there were various "incidents", or armed clashes of a
limited nature between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China, but all had subsided.
However, this changed on the night of July 7, 1937, when a small Japanese force on maneuvers
near the Marco Polo Bridge demanded entry to the tiny walled town of Wanping in order to search
for one of their soldiers. However, the Chinese garrison in the town refused the Japanese entry;
a shot was heard, and the two sides began firing. The Chinese government,
under strong anti-Japanese pressure, refused to make any concessions in the
negotiation of the dispute and the Japanese also maintained their position. As a result,
the conflict continued to grow, with larger forces committed by both sides and fighting spread to
other parts of China. Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which marked the beginning of
The Second Sino-Japanese War or War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression between 1937–1945,
the Japanese scored major victories, capturing Beijing, Shanghai and the Chinese capital of
Nanjing in 1937, which resulted in the Nanjing Massacre also known as the Rape of Nanjing.
The Battle of Shanghai which lasted from August 13, 1937, to 26 November 26 the same year, was one
of the largest and bloodiest battles of the entire war. It was later described as "Stalingrad on the
Yangtze" and is often regarded as the battle where World War II started. After over three months of
extensive fighting on land, in the air and at sea, the battle concluded with a victory for Japan.
The battle can be divided into three stages, and eventually involved nearly one million troops. The
first stage lasted from August 13 to August 22, 1937, during which the National Revolutionary Army
of the Republic of China attempted to eradicate Japanese troop presence in downtown Shanghai. The
second stage lasted from August 23 to October 26, 1937, during which the Japanese launched
amphibious landings on the Jiangsu coast and the two armies fought a Stalingrad-like house-to-house
battle, with the Japanese attempting to gain control of the city and the surrounding regions.
The last stage, ranging from October 27 to the end of November 1937,
involved the retreat of the Chinese army in the face of Japanese flanking maneuvers,
and the ensuing combat on the road to China's capital, Nanjing.
The Japanese General Iwane Matsui, who drove the Chinese Army from Shanghai and
had the 10th Army with which he would capture Nanjing under his command,
made it clear to his superiors that he was determined to capture the capital city of China,
Nanjing, which lay 300 kilometers west of Shanghai. Matsui forcefully asserted that
the war with China would not end until Nanjing was under their control, and he envisaged that
the fall of Nanjing would result in the total collapse of Chiang Kai-shek's government.
Although the massacre is generally described as having occurred over a
six-week period after the fall of Nanjing, the crimes committed by the Japanese army
were not limited to that period alone. Many atrocities were reported to have
been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing.
Perhaps the most notorious atrocity was a killing contest between two Japanese officers Toshiaki
Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, both born in 1912. The contest was a race to see who could behead
100 people first using only a swordand was covered much like a sporting event in Japanese newspaper
with regular updates on the score in four articles from 30 November to 13 December 1937.
On 2 December of the same year, more than five days ahead of schedule, the Japanese captured
Danyang. In order to achieve such speeds, the Japanese soldiers carried little with
them except weaponry and ammunition. Because they were marching well ahead of most of their
supply lines they had to purchase or loot their food from Chinese civilians along the way. One
of the reasons that the 10th Army was advancing to Nanjing quite rapidly was due to the tacit consent
among the Japanese officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wished. And they did.
Around this time, Mukai had killed 89 people, and Noda had killed 78.
On 13 December 1937, the 6th and the 116th Divisions of the Japanese Army
were the first to enter Nanjing, facing little military resistance.
From On 13 December 1937, the Japanese Army, including Sublieutenants Toshiaki
Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, engaged in random murder, wartime rape, looting, arson,
and other war crimes. They hunted down and killed suspected Chinese soldiers and summarily arrested
thousands of young Chinese men. Many innocent men were misidentified and killed in the process.
Thousands were taken to the Yangtze River,
where they were machine-gunned to death. Many Chinese soldiers were blown up with landmines,
then doused with petrol and set on fire; and those who survived were killed with
bayonets. Japanese soldiers also beheaded a number of Chinese prisoners of war.
The Japanese also massacred families living outside the Safety Zone,
and raped tens of thousands of women. On one occasion, a Chinese woman, Mrs. Ha,
had asked the Japanese soldiers why they had murdered her husband. Before finally killing both
her and her baby by stabbing them with a bayonet in the chest, they shot Mrs. Ha and raped her.
The number of Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000, including
some children and the elderly. A large number of rapes were done systematically by the Japanese
soldiers as they went from door to door, searching for girls, with many women being captured and
gang-raped. Immediately after the women were then often killed through explicit mutilation.
A former Japanese soldier named Shiro Azuma spoke candidly about the process of rape and
murder in Nanjing: “ It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldn't say all
right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don't talk.”
After being raped by the Japanese soldiers, the victims were often photographed.
There are also accounts of Japanese troops coercing families to commit incestuous acts.
Sons were coerced in to rape their mothers, fathers were forced to rape their daughters,
and brothers were forced to rape their sisters. Instead of punishing the Japanese
troops who were responsible for wholesale rape, "'The Japanese expeditionary Force
in Central China issued an order to set up comfort houses during this period of time.
The Japanese army also looted the city and burned down many buildings,
one-third of the city was destroyed as a result of arson.
Such crime continued from three to six weeks depending on the types of crime.
When on the December 13, 1937 the Japanese Army entered the city, the reporters who caught up
with Mukai and Noda didn’t report on the massacres commited by Japanese but they noted that both men
– Mukai and Noda - had already passed their goal According to a December 13, 1937 article by the
journalists, Tsuyoshi Noda had killed 105 people while Toshiaki Mukai had killed
106 people. However, because the two did not know who was the first to reach the 100 milestone,
with the permission of their superior officer, they decided to continue their contest to see
who would first reach 150 kills. The headline of the newspaper was “Incredible Record in the
Contest to Behead 100 People – Mukai 106 and Noda 105. Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings”.
During the interview, Mukai was apparently a bit upset about some damage to his sword,
and said: “It is marred because I sliced someone down the middle, together with his helmet.”
What Mukai and Noda did not mention was that in fact they were largely killing
defenseless prisoners and their victims were not killed in action but rather murdered.
Noda would later say: “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!” meaning “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”
As many as 300,000 civilians and numerous unarmed Chinese soldiers were killed over
the course of two months during the Battle of Nanking . The chaos, fires, and mass graves make
a precise count of casualties impossible. The violence subsided in February 1938,
after the establishment of a Chinese led, Japanese influenced government.
After the war, a written record of the contest found its way into the documents of the
International Military Tribunal for the Far East and in 1947, both Mukai and Noda were arrested
by the U.S. Army and detained at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. They were then extradited to China
and tried by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. On trial with the two men was Gunkichi Tanaka,
a Japanese Army captain who personally killed over 300 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians
with his sword during the Nanjing massacre. The 3 men were found guilty of atrocities
committed during the Battle of Nanking and the subsequent massacre, and sentenced to death.
On 28 January 1948, Mukai, Noda and Tanaka were
executed by shooting. Mukai and Noda were both 35 years old, Tanaka was 42.
During their trial, neither Mukai nor Noda publicly denied participating in what was
described by Japanese newspaper in 1937 as " friendly contest".
In 2003 however the families of Mukai and Noda sued the authors of the
stories describing the Hundred man killing contest for false statements, requesting
US$300,000 in compensation. Two years later, in 2005, Tokyo District Court ruled that
“the contest did occur and was not an intentional fabrication by the media”.
There were no tears shed for Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda.
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