Contest To Kill 100 People Using A Sword - Postwar Accounts

Postwar Accounts

See also: Historiography of the Nanking Massacre

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, 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 Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, as well as the 2009 film, John Rabe.