"The Japanese army had a ‘kill 100 people with a sword’..." Topic

…contest in 1937.

"In one of the lesser known facts of history, in 1937 two Japanese officers named Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda held a contest over who could kill 100 people with his sword (Magoroku) first?

Mukai and Noda were two young second lieutenants in the Katagiri Regiment's Toyama Battalion and their contest was held during the Japanese invasion of China. The winner was announced on Dec. 10, 1937, only a couple of days before the Japanese Army entered Nanking (now Nanjing). Nanking, then the capital of the Republic of China (now of the Jiangsu province), was captured by the Japanese army on December 13, 1937 and in six weeks over 200,000 residents were murdered and thousands of women were raped. It would become known as the Nanking Massacre and Rape of Nanking.

It didn't stop then, on the day when the winner was announced to who had the most kills, they both agreed to take the contest up to a 150 people…"
Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

And both were eventually executed for war crimes as most of their kills were against unarmed prisoners.

Also known as jerk of the year contest. Making dropping the A bombs look like a good idea.

A perversion of Bushido. Think of it as unscrupulous Japanese samurai "testing" the sharpness of their katanas on poor hapless peasants for sport or their own amusement writ large.

But justifying dropping nukes on civilians? I wouldn't quite go that far.

When it's multiplied a thousand-fold, and then another hundred-fold, it starts looking more that way …

One thing that struck me in reading "Unbroken" was the incredibly wide variation in how different groups of Japanese treated American prisoners. They'd be captured and beaten, then hospitalized, carefully nursed back to health and treated as honored guests, then shipped to a near approximation of hell, then have a kind guard give them extra food and protect them, etc.

Yes, the same strange contradictions were seen elsewhere. One of the three regiments that invaded Hong Kong treated PoWs with utmost respect; in one instance allowing the REs to march out of Sai Wan Fort with all the honours of war and in another instance allowing a captured Portuguese company of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps to go free (whereupon they rejoined the defenders). The other two regiments meanwhile, perpetrated some of the most bestial acts of the war on PoWs, medical staff, civilians and even St John's Ambulance Cadets.

As a side issue. More people were killed in Nanking then were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. If Japan was defeated, then it should have been the duty of it's government to surrender when the war had been lost. The A-bomb was used because the Japanese government would not surrender.

Bushido had nothing yo do with killing civilians! It is the duty owed by an individual (Samurai?) to his master and what his masters duty was to his Samurai and to who he owed allegiance to. The military corrupted Bushido in order to push the Japanese people into war and it took the emperor to give the government the ability to surrender.

There is a novel called "The Last Mandarin" by Stephen Becker which incorporates this incident into its plot. The main character is an American sent to Peking after WWII to find and bring back one of these Japanese, ostensibly to be tried as a war criminal. He soon discovers that there is more to the situation than meets the eye.

A very good novel, BTW. Available from Amazon as a used paperback for less than $5.00 USD plus shipping.

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MH

This contest is featured prominently in the Nanjing Memorial Hall dedicated to remembering the Japanese invasion

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It is quite a moving place to visit

Agree!

Amicalement
Armand

When the war was over, and it was time to exchange prisoners, the Japanese managed to scare up 56 surviving Chinese prisoners.

That's all that was still left alive.

In many units of the Japanese army in China, prisoners of war were "issued" to the training cadres as training materials.

Japanese theories on the conditioning of a soldier for war recognized the natural abhorrence most people feel towards lethal violence. So as part of their final training (usually conducted in the unit) soldiers participated in bayonet practice with live targets. Each trainee was required to charge the prisoner (who was tied to a post) and make one thrust with the bayonet. This was a final conditioning step, almost akin to a graduation ceremony. Prisoners generally were useful for training 10 to 20 soldiers before they had to be replaced.

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(University of Hawaii photo – caution, not pleasant to see)

Officer training cadres, on the other hand, were usually issued one prisoner per officer cadet, for a similar final step in training using their sword (rather than a bayonet). Once beheaded, the prisoner was of no use for further training.

Most of these types of atrocities, though well researched and documented by Chinese, American, Australian, British and Indian sources, and attested to by numerous first-hand accounts of former Japanese soldiers, are denied by official sources in Japan.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)