The Race to Kill- A Bizarre Incident that is Shocking

 With the Tsunami having devastated Japan, one is obviously in sympathy with the common Japanese people. But at the same time my mind reverts to an incident that cannot be done by a sane man. This is the race to kill and behead as many Chinese as possible between two soldiers of the Imperial army during World War II during the infamous occupation of China by Japan.
 The Chinese people have suffered a lot. First with the Opium wars imposed by the Western powers and later the Japanese. The occupation of China led to untold atrocities by the Imperial army, which a section of the Japanese intelligentsia deny. But Novelist Ishikawa Tatsuzo  in his novel  Iketeiru Hetai  after interviews conducted with troops which took part in the Nanking massacre  ( Jan 1938) has portrayed the atrocities committed by the 16th Division of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force in a decisive manner.


Worse  during the same period two Japanese Officers Lieutenants Mukai and Noda  of the Imperial Army  carried out a killing and beheading contest between themselves. One wonders how such a contest was allowed to be carried on.The like of such a contest has not been seen or heard anywhere. The sad part was that the contest was covered in the news papers  and regular updates were given. The contest involved as to which of the two Officers could behead more Chinese. It was a shocking contest the like of which was never seen before.
Though some historians and Japanese scholars opined that perhaps the story was a concocted one to raise the national fighting spirit, yet the facts as reported in the Japanese Press of that period cannot be brushed aside.  In 2005 a suit was brought before the Tokyo district judge by the families of the the two Lieutenants  to absolve the two of the crime. But the case was dismissed by the judge on the grounds that the two officers had themselves admitted that they were in race with each other as to who could reach the figure of 100 beheading first. For the record Lieutenant  Mukai had 106 killings to 105 of Noda. it was certainly a bizarre contest.The sad part is that that the Imperial army took no action against these officers. This contrasts sharply with the US Army's action in the MyLai massacre in Vietnam when the concerned Lieutenant faced a Court Martial.