Contest to kill 100 people using a sword The 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 . Wartime accounts . In 1937 , the " Osaka Mainichi Shimbun " and its sister newspaper the " Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun " covered a contest between two Japan ese officers , and , 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 . . . 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 . Postwar accounts . 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 " " , 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 . "