[...] Hora said he "knew of this contest for a long time." But Omori in 1966 was the first postwar Japanese to write about it. Neither went beyond this thumbnail sketch of the "contest." Neither mentioned that the Tokyo war crimes tribunal (IMTFE) released Mukai and Noda from Sugamo Prison and extradited them to stand trial and be executed as B- and C-class war criminals at the Nanking Military Tribunal (NMT). The Chinese first learned of this "killing contest" from two English-language articles that originally appeared in the 7 and 14 December 1937 issues of the Japan Advertiser. H. J. Timperley of the Manchester Guardian reprinted these as "Appendix F: The Nanking 'Murder Race' " in his 1938 What War Means. Accounts of the contest appeared in further redacted form in the 1 January 1938 issue of China Weekly Review and in other wartime Chinese-language publications, both nationalist and communist.
[...] The Japan Advertiser articles quoted by Timperley and circulated in China held that a "murder race" took place between Kuyung and Purple Mountain (Tzuchinshan). These articles would be crucial as evidence in executing Noda Tsuyoshi (not Takeshi or Iwao) and Mukai Toshiaki for war crimes at the NMT; and in 1997-99 Iris Chang, Erwin Wickert, and Jonathan Spence still cited the articles as historically factual.' However, we should note, NMT records state that the defendants were executed for a recreational killing contest held entirely on Purple Mountain. Although both pleaded not guilty, this "beastly and wicked killing" of innocent noncombatants and POWs was "unprecedented in the modern history of mankind." Moreover, the NMT records continue, one defendant (Noda) protested that the contest never took place. Instead, reporters for Tokyo nichinichi shinbun which ran the original articles later digested in the Japan Advertiser fabricated the story after the other defendant (Mukai) had bragged about these imaginary feats. For his part, Mukai insisted he never really killed anyone but boasted that he had, hoping the publicity would attract a better wife after he returned to Japan."
Hora neither saw the NMT records nor did he mention "Appendix F" despite citing a Japanese translation of Timperley's book. So he probably had not read the Japan Advertiser story before writing his 1967 chapter. Actually, he omitted all the above details and devoted less than half a page to the killing contest, probably because he felt it was but one minor aspect in the Nanking "Incident" as he then called the Atrocity. His 118-page chapter was the first extended empirical study of it based on Japanese, Chinese, and Western sources to appear anywhere. As with most pioneering works, it had factual errors about the "Incident" as a whole, e.g., that the alleged killing contest began at Kuyung. Still, left-wing historians gave their immediate stamp of approval by citing it as evidence for the Nanking Atrocity in their own works. lenaga Saburo's 1968 Taiheiyo senso is a case in point.' Yet Hora's landmark work did not provoke a debate or inspire more research