The Hundred Head Contest: Reassessing the Nanjing Massacre

Japan Focus introduction: In late 1937, a Tokyo newspaper reported on a “hundred head contest” in which two Japanese imperial army officers competed to see who could lop off one hundred Chinese heads first during the campaign to take the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. The contest is symbolic of the perversion and loss of military discipline during the Japanese capture and occupation of the city that has come to be known variously as the Nanjing Massacre, the Rape of Nanjing, or simply the Nanjing Incident. The event belongs to a long list of 20th century atrocities, and is emblematic of Chinese suffering at the hands of a barbarous Japanese military as well as of Japanese predations across wartime Asia and the Pacific.As part of what one might call a “canon” of horror, various groups have interests in how the event is remembered not only in China and Japan, but also internationally. Estimates of the numbers killed at Nanjiing vary from several thousand to over 300,000, depending on national and political persuasion and the parameters one puts in terms of time, place, and ethnicity of victim. (See David Askew, “New Research on the Nanjing Incident,” available at http://www.japanfocus.org/109.html).