Contest To Kill 100 People Using A Sword

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 Nanjing 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.