TOKYO — The man who boasted of beheading more than 300 Chinese prisoners and civilians with his beloved sword during the rape of Nanjing has been executed by firing squad, ending one of the most notorious chapters of Japanese wartime atrocity and delivering a measure of justice nearly three years after the guns fell silent across Asia.
Captain Gichi Tanaka, 42, was shot in the mountains of the Yutai district on January 28, 1948, alongside two fellow officers whose names had become synonymous with the orgy of killing that consumed the Chinese capital in the winter of 1937. The executions closed a war crimes trial that had gripped Shanghai and Nanjing and forced a nation to confront the savagery its soldiers unleashed in the name of the Emperor.
Tanaka, born in Tokyo on March 19, 1905, was a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, the principal officer training school of the empire. He rose to command a company in the 6th Division’s 45th Regiment and took part in the Battle of Shanghai before his unit marched on Nanjing, the Chinese capital that lay 300 kilometers to the west.
The road to that city had been paved with blood long before Tanaka’s boots touched its gates. Japan’s hunger for raw materials to feed its growing industries had driven the invasion of Manchuria on September 18, 1931, when a small explosive device planted by Japanese operatives beside the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden provided the pretext for seizing all of northeastern China.
By March 1, 1932, the puppet state of Manchukuo had been established, and the Empire of the Rising Sun had secured the coal, oil, rubber, lumber and mineral wealth it craved. Manchuria also served as a buffer against Soviet ambitions in Siberia, a strategic calculation that would shape a decade of undeclared conflict.
Limited clashes between Japanese and Chinese forces flared and subsided for years until the night of July 7, 1937, when a small Japanese force on maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge demanded entry to the walled town of Wanping to search for a missing soldier. The Chinese garrison refused. A shot rang out.
Both sides opened fire, and the Second Sino-Japanese War had begun.
What followed was a war of resistance against Japanese aggression that would not end until Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945. Between those dates, Japanese forces captured Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing, and in the process committed atrocities that the postwar tribunals would struggle to fully document.
The Battle of Shanghai, fought from August 13 to November 26, 1937, was among the largest and bloodiest engagements of the entire war. Later described as Stalingrad on the Yangtze, it involved nearly one million troops and is regarded by some historians as the true starting point of World War II.
Tanaka served as a company commander throughout the three stages of that battle, from the National Revolutionary Army’s attempt to eradicate Japanese presence in downtown Shanghai, through the amphibious landings on the Jiangsu coast and the house-to-house fighting that followed, to the Chinese retreat in the face of Japanese flanking maneuvers.
General Iwane Matsui, who drove the Japanese Army from Shanghai, made clear to his superiors that the war with China would not end until Nanjing was under Japanese control. He envisioned that the fall of the capital would cause the total collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s government. He was wrong about the collapse but devastatingly right about the fall.
As the Japanese Army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing, atrocities were reported along the entire route. Perhaps the most notorious was a killing contest between two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, reported in the Tokyo newspaper as a sporting event, complete with regular updates on the score, to see who could 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 100 people first using only a sword.
By December 9, Japanese forces had breached the last lines of Chinese resistance and arrived outside the city gates. Leaflets were dropped urging Nanjing to surrender within 24 hours, promising no mercy if the offer was refused. No response came.
General Matsui waited another hour before ordering the city taken by force.
Most of the civilian population had already fled. Wealthy families left first in automobiles, followed by the middle class and then the poor. Only the destitute remained, and three-quarters of the population had escaped before the Japanese arrived.
Foreigners in the city created the Nanjing Safety Zone, managed by the International Committee led by German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe, which sheltered 250,000 Chinese civilians from death and violence.
At noon on December 9, the Japanese military dropped leaflets into the city. By the deadline on December 10, no response had been received. On December 12, under heavy artillery fire and aerial bombardment, General Tang Shengzhi, commander of the Nanjing Garrison, ordered his men to retreat.
What followed was chaos. Some Chinese soldiers stripped civilians of their clothing in a desperate attempt to blend in. Many others were shot by Chinese supervisory units as they tried to flee.
On December 13, the 6th and 116th Divisions of the Japanese Army entered the city facing little military resistance. From that day forward, Captain Gichi Tanaka and his comrades engaged in random murder, wartime rape, looting, arson and other war crimes. They hunted down and killed suspected Chinese soldiers and arbitrarily arrested thousands of young Chinese men.
Many innocent men were misidentified and killed.
Thousands were taken to the Yangtze River and machine-gunned to death. Many Chinese soldiers were blown up with landmines, doused with petrol and set on fire. Those who survived were killed with bayonets.
Japanese soldiers beheaded a number of Chinese prisoners of war.
Tanaka used his sword, named Sukehiro, to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 more than 300 prisoners of war and civilians, many of them by beheading. He was portrayed in Yamanaka Minetaro’s propaganda book Imperial Soldiers as a heroic fighter. In one photograph, he is shown in Nanjing cutting off the head of a civilian with his beloved sword.
The Japanese also massacred families living outside the safety zone and raped tens of thousands of women. On one occasion, a Chinese woman named Mrs. Ha asked Japanese soldiers why they had murdered her husband before they finally killed her and her baby with a bayonet to the chest.
They shot Mrs. Ha and raped her.
The number of Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000, including children and the elderly. A large number of rapes were done systematically as soldiers went from door to door searching for girls. Many women were captured and gang-raped immediately, then often killed through explicit mutilation.
A former Japanese soldier named Shiro Azuma spoke candidly about the process. “It would be all right if we only raped them,” he said. “I shouldn’t say all right, but we always stabbed and killed them because dead bodies don’t talk.”
After being raped, victims were often photographed.
There were also accounts of Japanese troops coercing families to commit incestuous acts. Sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and brothers were forced to rape their sisters. Instead of punishing the troops responsible for wholesale rape, the Japanese Expeditionary Force in Central China issued an order to set up comfort houses.
The Japanese Army also looted the city and burned down many buildings. One-third of Nanjing was destroyed as a result of arson. Such crimes continued for three to six weeks depending on the type of crime.
As many as 300,000 civilians and numerous unarmed Chinese soldiers were killed over the course of two months. The chaos, fires and mass graves made a precise count of casualties impossible.
The violence subsided in February 1938 after the establishment of a Chinese-led, Japanese-influenced government. For nearly a decade, Tanaka escaped accountability. He was not among those on the list of war criminals responsible for the rape of Nanjing.
But in April 1947, the War Criminals Commission received a request from the Chinese delegation in Japan to extradite him to China as a war criminal.
On May 14, 1947, the request to add him to the list of those to be tried in connection with the rape of Nanjing was approved. Four days later, he was extradited to Shanghai and held in the war criminal detention center before being moved to Nanjing on May 22. On December 12, 1947, the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal began Tanaka’s public trial.
On December 17, the Ministry of Defense Military Tribunal combined Tanaka’s case with those of Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, known for the infamous contest over who could behead 100 people the fastest using their swords. During the trial, Tanaka refused to confess to any of the charges brought against him.
His defense regarding the photograph in which he is cutting off the head of a civilian with his sword was that the people in the photo were wearing short sleeves, meaning it could not have been taken during the rape of Nanjing, which happened in the winter. The prosecutor answered that it was entirely possible to remove one’s jacket in the commission of brutal acts.
At the trial, Tanaka, who during the Nanjing Massacre had been a captain in a division of Lieutenant General Tanisa, said: “Yes, I was part of Tan’s unit, but I had nothing to do with the rape of Nanjing. The killing of 300 people depicted in the book Imperial Soldiers was only propaganda intended to paint me as a heroic fighter. It was not a fact.
It was imagined up by the author. You can ask all the gods of Heaven and Earth and they will attest that I had nothing to do with the rape of Nanjing.”
His lies did not help him escape justice. Tanaka, Mukai and Noda were found guilty of having successfully massacred prisoners and non-combatants during the Battle of Nanjing and the subsequent massacre, and sentenced to death on January 28, 1948. All three were executed by shooting in the mountains of the Yutai district.
Mukai and Noda were both 35 years old. Tanaka was 42.
There were no tears shed for Gichi Tanaka. The verdict and execution were met with quiet satisfaction in Nanjing, where the scars of 1937 remain raw and where the memory of 300,000 dead has never faded. For the survivors and the families of the victims, the firing squad in the Yutai mountains represented not closure but a long-delayed acknowledgment of the truth.
The Nanjing Massacre remains one of the most documented and most contested atrocities of the twentieth century. Japanese revisionists have sought for decades to minimize or deny the scale of the killing, but the verdicts against Tanaka, Mukai and Noda, based on eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence and the defendants’ own propaganda, stand as a permanent rebuttal.
The executions also underscored a broader reckoning that followed Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East and the Chinese war crimes tribunals tried thousands of Japanese officers and soldiers for atrocities committed across Asia. Many were convicted.
Some were executed. Others served prison terms and returned to civilian life.
But the Nanjing trials carried a special weight. They were held in the city where the crimes occurred, before judges and prosecutors who had lived through the occupation, and they forced Japanese defendants to confront the evidence of their own brutality in the place where it happened. For Tanaka, that confrontation ended with a refusal to confess and a sentence of death.
Historians note that the Nanjing Massacre was not an isolated explosion of violence but the culmination of a military culture that dehumanized Chinese civilians and prisoners, and of a strategic decision to terrorize the population into submission. The killing contest between Mukai and Noda, reported as a sporting event in the Tokyo newspaper, reflected that culture. So did the comfort houses, the systematic rape, and the arson that destroyed a third of the city.
The execution of Gichi Tanaka will not bring back the 300,000 dead. It will not heal the wounds of the survivors. It will not erase the photographs, the testimony or the mass graves.
But it does establish, in the permanent record of international law, that the men who committed these crimes were not heroes, not soldiers, not patriots. They were war criminals, and they were held to account.
As the sun rose over the Yutai district on January 28, 1948, three men who had once been celebrated in the pages of Imperial Soldiers faced a firing squad. The propaganda that had made them famous had been 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 as a lie. The swords that had killed hundreds were silent.
And in Nanjing, a city that had endured the unendurable, the news arrived that justice, however late, had finally been done.