Japanese war crimes on the march to Nanking
In 2005 what made the judge in a Tokyo district court rule against a claim brought by families of lieutenants against a newspaper publisher for an article about the Nanking Massacre?
Nanking Massacre
Nanking Massacre Contest to kill 100 people using a sword George Ashmore Fitch Estimates of the death toll for the Nanking Massacre Ann Rule
Nanking_Massacre-Japanese_war_crimes_on_the_march_to_Nanking Contest_to_kill_100_people_using_a_sword-Lawsuit George_Ashmore_Fitch-Nanking_Massacre Estimates_of_the_death_toll_for_the_Nanking_Massacre-Early_estimates Ann_Rule-Criticism
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.
In April 2003, the families of Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda filed a defamation suit against Katsuichi Honda, Kashiwa Shobō, the Asahi Shimbun, and the "Mainichi Shimbun", requesting ¥36,000,000 (approx. US$300,000 in 2003) in compensation. On August 23, 2005, Tokyo District Court Judge Akio Doi dismissed the suit on the grounds that "contest did occur, and was not fabricated by the media". The judge stated that, although the original newspaper article included "false elements", the officers admitted that they had raced to kill 100 people and "it is difficult to say it was fiction."
When the Nanking Massacre occurred in 1937–1938, Fitch, who was head of the YMCA there, served as director of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. He compiled a diary and filmed some of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanking in December 1937. Writing later in his autobiography, Fitch said, "My story created a sensation in Shanghai, for it was the first news of what had happened in the capital since its evacuation, and it was copied and mimeographed and widely distributed there." In 1938 Fitch traveled throughout the United States giving talks about the Nanking Massacre and showing films to document it. In the documentary film Nanking, Fitch was portrayed by actor John Getz. 
The Nanking Massacre was reported internationally within a week of occurring and the first rough estimate of the full death toll was published on January 24, 1938 in the "New China Daily". In this article the Australian journalist Harold Timperley was quoted as stating that 300,000 civilians had been killed. However, Timperley's source for this number was Father Jacquinot who was in Shanghai at the time of the massacre. The second estimate of the death toll was made in a book Timperley published later the same year, "Japanese Terror In China", which quoted "a foreign member of the University faculty" as stating that "close to 40,000 unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of Nanking". The source of this information was Miner Searle Bates, an American resident in Nanking who had used the burial records of the Red Swastika Society in his calculations. These two estimates were in turn supplanted by the findings of two postwar war crime trials, the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal. In one estimate the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal put the death toll at more than 300,000, though the Tribunal also recorded other estimates including one of 430,000. The International Military Tribunal of the Far East tallied up 155,000 victims of the massacre, though in their verdict against General Iwane Matsui this figure was modified somewhat to "upwards of 100,000 people". The first historian to make an academic estimate of the death toll of the Nanking Massacre was Tomio Hora in his 1967 book "Kindai Senshi no Nazo" ("Riddles of Modern War History"), who argued in favor of 200,000. Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world. 
In 2003, Rule's publisher released "Heart Full of Lies", a book about Liysa Northon, who maintains that she was a battered spouse and that she shot her husband in 2000 to protect herself and her children. Rule's book suggested Liysa Northon premeditated the killing and faked evidence of abuse. A defamation lawsuit filed by Northon against Rule and her publishers was dismissed in January 2011 by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Northon was released from prison in October 2012 twelve years after killing her husband. Rule filed a libel lawsuit against the "Seattle Weekly" newspaper in July 2013, saying she was defamed in 2011 when the fiancé of Northon wrote an article accusing Rule of "sloppy storytelling." The suit, filed in King County Superior Court in July 2013, argued that damage was done because Rule, to sell her books, relies on her reputation for accuracy. On February 24 and 25, 2014, a judge made two rulings dismissing the claims, finding that Rule's suit violated a Washington state law barring lawsuits that target the legal exercise of free speech and public participation, and that Rule had not established there were any false, defamatory statements about her in the article. The judge awarded Rick Swart, the newspaper and two other defendants $10,000 each in damages, plus attorneys fees and costs. “Rule admitted that she never interviewed Liysa or members of her immediate family,” said Swart. 