Hundred man killing contest

The hundred man killing contest (百人斬り競争, hyakunin-giri kyōsō) was a newspaper account of a contest between Toshiaki Mukai (3 June 1912 – 28 January 1948) and Tsuyoshi Noda (1912 – 28 January 1948), two Japanese Army officers serving during the Japanese invasion of China, over who could kill 100 people the fastest while using a sword. The two officers were later executed on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their involvement.^[1]

The news stories were rediscovered in the 1970s, which sparked a larger controversy over Japanese war crimes in China, particularly the Nanjing Massacre. The modern historical consensus is that the stories did not occur as they were described.^[2][3] The original accounts printed in the newspaper described the killings as hand-to-hand combat; however, historians have suggested that they were most likely a part of Japanese mass killings of Chinese prisoners of war.^[4][5]