Japanese soldiers race to kill 100 Chinese with swords during WWII
Japanese soldiers race to kill 100 Chinese with swords during WWII. The contest to kill 100 people using a sword is a wartime account of a contest between two Japanese Army officers during the Japanese invasion of China over who could first kill 100 people with a sword. 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 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 and by descendants of the two officers.