Japanese war crimes on the march to Nanking
Why did the judge rule against the civil claim?
Nanking Massacre
Approach of the Imperial Japanese Army. Japanese war crimes on the march to Nanking. Although the Nanking Massacre is generally described as having occurred over a six-week period after the fall of Nanking, the crimes committed by the Japanese army were not limited to that period. Many atrocities were reported to have been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanking. According to one Japanese journalist embedded with Imperial forces at the time, "The reason that the Army is advancing to Nanking quite rapidly is due to the tacit consent among the officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wish. "Novelist Ishikawa Tatsuzo vividly described how the 16th Division of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force committed atrocities on the march between Shanghai and Nanking in his novel "Ikiteiru Heitai" (Living Soldiers), which was based on interviews that Tatsuzo conducted with troops in Nanking in January 1938. Perhaps the most notorious atrocity was a killing contest between two Japanese officers as reported in the "Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun" and the English language "Japan Advertiser". The contest— a race between the two officers (later executed for wartime atrocities) to see which of them could kill 100 people first using only a sword— was covered much like a sporting event with regular updates on the score over a series of days. In Japan, the veracity of the newspaper article about the contest was the subject of ferocious debate for several decades starting in 1967. In 2000, a historian concurred with certain Japanese scholars who had argued that the contest was a concocted story, with the collusion of the soldiers themselves for the purpose of raising the national fighting spirit. In 2005, a Tokyo district judge dismissed a suit by the families of the lieutenants, stating that "the lieutenants admitted the fact that they raced to kill 100 people" and that the story cannot be proven to be clearly false. The judge also ruled against the civil claim of the plaintiffs because the original article was more than 60 years old. The historicity of the event remains disputed in Japan.