On this date, January 28, 1948, two Japanese Sub Lieutenant, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi were executed by firing squad in Yuhuatai for their mass murdering spree during the Battle of Nanking in December 1937.
The December 13, 1937 article in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun's Contest to kill 100 people using a sword series. Mukai (left) and Noda (right)
Two Second Lieutenants in the 9th Infantry Regiment of the 16th Division, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, who were tried in Nanking. (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.nankingatrocities.net/Tribunals/nanjing_02.htm)
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 Nanking 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.