Tsuyoshi Noda

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 who could first kill 100 people with a 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 Nanking Massacre and by descendants of the two officers.

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.

In 1937, the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and its sister newspaper the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun covered a contest between two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai (向井敏明) and Tsuyoshi Noda (野田毅), in which the two men were described as vying with one another to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword. The competition supposedly took place en route to Nanking, directly prior to the infamous Nanking Massacre, and was covered in four articles, from November 30 to December 13, 1937, the two last being translated in the Japan Advertiser.

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