Painful Death of Gunkichi Tanaka *Warning Real Footage JJ

There is a photograph that survives from December 1937. A Japanese officer stands over a kneeling man, sword raised, the officer is smiling. That photograph was published in a children’s book, not hidden, not censored. Printed as a hero story for kids to read about a man the Japanese public was told to admire.

 His name was Gungkichi Tanaka. And for 10 years after that photo ran, nobody put him on trial for it. This is a true story about how a war criminal hides in plain sight for a decade and what finally brought him down. If you’re new here, this channel investigates the men behind the worst crimes of the 20th century using court records, wartime documents, and the paper trail they left behind trying to disappear into history.

Hit subscribe now because the record on this case is more disturbing and more thoroughly documented than most people realize. Every investigation starts with a lie. And this one starts on September 18th, 1931. Next to a railway line outside the Chinese city of Mukten. A small explosive goes off.

 The damage is trivial. A stretch of track barely disturbed. But Japanese army units stationed nearby move within hours, seizing the entire city. Historians have long concluded the bombing was staged by Japan’s own military, a manufactured pretext to justify what officers had already planned to do. Within 6 months, Japan controls all of Manuria, an industrial region roughly the size of France, rich in the coal, oil, and raw materials that resource poor Japan desperately needed to keep its war machine running. Tokyo installs a puppet

regime and calls it independence. Nobody outside Japan is fooled. For 6 years, an uneasy standoff simmers between Japan and China. Flash points, skirmishes, nothing that fully ignites. Then, on the night of July 7th, 1937, a Japanese unit conducting maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge claims a soldier has gone missing inside a nearby walled town.

 They demand to search it. The Chinese garrison refuses. A single shot is fired. To this day, historians can’t say with certainty which side pulled the trigger first. It didn’t matter. That gunshot detonated the Second Sino-Japanese War, a conflict that by its end in 1945 would kill an estimated 14 to 20 million people and that would fold directly into the wider catastrophe of the Second World War.

Gungichi Tanaka was born in Tokyo in 1905 in a nation where military service wasn’t just a career. It was treated as moral duty. He came up through Japan’s officer pipeline exactly as designed. Military Preparatory School, then the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, the institution responsible for producing virtually the entire officer Corps that would run Japan’s war.

 two years of academic and physical foundation, eight months embedded with an infantry regiment, learning weapons and platoon command firsthand, then close to two more years of advanced training before officers were finally trusted to lead men in the field. By the time Tanaka reached China, he wasn’t improvising. He was the product of roughly a decade of deliberate preparation.

 A company commander in the 45th regiment sixth division trained specifically for this. In August 1937 that training was tested in one of the deadliest urban battles of the entire century. Historians have called the Battle of Shanghai Stalingrad on the Yangze. Some argue it not the more commonly cited 1939 date is where World War II actually began.

 Nearly 1 million soldiers fought through the city over three months in three distinct phases. A Chinese attempt to root Japanese forces out of downtown Shanghai, a Japanese amphibious counter assault that turned into house-to-house slaughter, and finally a Chinese retreat under punishing flanking pressure. Tanaka was there for all of it, commanding troops in some of the fiercest sustained combat of the war.

Japan won. And the general who won it, Iwan Matsui, wasn’t finished. 300 km west sat Nanjing, the seat of Chiang Kai-sheks government. Matsui was convinced that if Nanjing fell, Chinese resistance would collapse with it. He was wrong about the collapse. He was catastrophically right about how much damage his army could do getting there.

Court records and wartime journalism both confirm the massacre didn’t begin the day Nanjing fell. It began on the march toward it. Villages were burned along the route. Civilians were executed roadside. And in one of the most well-documented atrocities of the entire war, two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Suyoshi Nota, turned mass murder into a publicity stunt.

 A Tokyo newspaper, the Japan Advertiser, ran real-time updates on their self-declared contest, a race to see who could kill 100 people first by sword, tracked like a scoreboard for readers back home. That’s the documented culture Tanaka’s unit was operating inside. Not a rumor, printed, dated, by lined news coverage.

By December 9th, 1937, Japanese forces reached Nanjing<unk>s gates. Word of the advance had outrun the army itself. Roughly 3/arters of the city’s population had already fled. The wealthy left first by car, then the middle class. What remained were the residents with no means to escape at all.

 A small group of foreign residents led by German businessmen and [clears throat] in one of history’s stranger footnotes, Nazi party member John Reb established the Nanjing safety zone. Records credit it with sheltering roughly 250,000 Chinese civilians. It stands as one of the only documented acts of large-scale protection in this entire chapter of history.

 On December 9th, Japanese aircraft dropped leaflets over the city. Surrender within 24 hours or face no mercy. Nonjing did not surrender. On December 12th, the city’s garrison commander, who had publicly vowed to fight to the death, instead ordered a chaotic retreat. Soldiers tore off their uniforms, trying to vanish into the civilian population.

 Chinese supervisory units shot many of their own men for attempting to flee. On December 13th, 1937, Japanese troops entered the city. Gungichi Tanaka was among them. What happened next is documented across multiple independent sources. The diaries of foreign residents who stayed in the safety zone, postwar tribunal testimony, and Japanese soldiers own later accounts.

 Chinese men of military age were rounded up and mass often on nothing more than suspicion and executed. Many had never carried a weapon. Prisoners were marched to the banks of the Yangze River and killed with machine gunfire. Others were killed by landmine, by fire, by bayonet. Sexual violence was committed on a scale historians still debate the precise numbers of, but responsible estimates place well into the tens of thousands of women affected.

 Much of it carried out systematically, doortodoor, block by block, rather than as scattered incidents. Close to a third of the city was burned. By the time the violence subsided in February 1938, somewhere between roughly 200,000 and 300,000 people, soldiers and civilians combined had been killed. Mass graves, fires, and the sheer chaos of the killing mean no exact figure has ever been possible to confirm.

 Gungichi Tanaka was not a witness to this. He was a participant. Using a sword he had personally named Sukahhiro, Tanaka is documented to have killed more than 300 prisoners and civilians, many by beheading. A wartime propaganda book, Imperial Soldiers, featured him as a celebrated hero of the campaign, including the photograph described at the top of this video, Tanaka Mid execution, sword raised over a civilian.

 His country didn’t hide what he did. For a while, it printed it for children to read. For nearly a decade, Tanaka wasn’t on any list. The most senior officers tied to Nonjing, including Tanaka’s own commanding general, faced tribunals in the immediate postwar years. Tanaka went home. He wasn’t charged. He wasn’t questioned.

 Then in April 1947, Chinese officials formally petitioned for his extradition, citing direct evidence connecting him to the Nonjing atrocities. The request was approved within weeks. Tanaka was transferred first to Shanghai, then to Nanjing itself to stand trial in the same city where he had once used his sword like a tool of his trade.

 His trial opened in December 1947. Officials merged his case with Mukai and Notas, the two officers behind the newspaper killing contest, putting all three men in front of the same tribunal. Tanaka denied everything, and his defense is a matter of public record. He argued the photograph of him beheading a civilian couldn’t be authentic because the people in it wore short sleeves and the massacre, he pointed out, happened in December in winter.

 The prosecutor’s response is recorded almost word for word. Nothing stopped a man from removing his jacket to commit murder more comfortably. Tanaka went further still, insisting the entire account of 300 killings was fabricated, a propaganda author’s invention designed to manufacture him as a hero with no basis. In fact, he told the tribunal that the gods of heaven and earth themselves would attest to his innocence.

 The tribunal didn’t accept a word of it. Gungichi Tanaka, Toshiaki Mukai, and Suyoshi Nota were convicted of the mass killing of prisoners and unarmed civilians during the fall of Nanjing. All three were sentenced to death. On January 28th, 1948, in the hills of Nanjing<unk>s Yuwatai district, ground that had absorbed so many of their victims a decade before.

 All three men were executed by firing squad. Mukai and Nota were 35. Tanaka was 42. No newspaper mourned them. No record shows anyone pleading for clemency on their behalf. The man once photographed as a celebrated hero, sword raised over a defenseless civilian died facing armed men in the same country he had terrorized a decade late, but on the record and permanently.

 History almost let this one slide. It didn’t. If you want more investigations like this one, real records, real trials, real consequences, subscribe and we’ll keep digging up what the history books leave