Hundred man killing contest

[1] The news stories were rediscovered in the 1970s, which sparked a larger controversy over Japanese war crimes in China, particularly the Nanjing Massacre.

Therefore, according to the journalists Asami Kazuo and Suzuki Jiro, writing in the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi Shimbun of 13 December, they decided to begin another contest with the goal of 150 kills.

On trial with the two men was Gunkichi Tanaka, a Japanese Army captain who personally killed over 300 Chinese POWs and civilians with his sword during the massacre.

[13] The Sankei Shimbun and Japanese politician Tomomi Inada have publicly demanded that the Asahi and Mainichi media companies retract their wartime reporting of the contest.

[14] In a later work, Katsuichi Honda placed the account of the killing contest into 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 after consecutively beheading nine prisoners.

[15]In 2000, Bob Wakabayashi weighed in with his own study which concluded that although "the killing contest itself was a fabrication" by journalists, it "provoked a full-blown controversy as to the historicity of the Nanking Atrocity as a whole."

In turn, the controversy "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.

"[3] In a later book, Wakabayashi quotes Joshua Fogel as saying that "to accept the story as true and accurate requires a leap of faith that no balanced historian can make.