Public Execution of Gunkichi Tanaka *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

He collected heads like trophies. His sword had a name, and when the world finally caught him, even his own lies couldn’t save him from the firing squad. This is the true story of Captain Gunkichi Tanaka, a man history almost let slip through the cracks entirely, buried in an unmarked grave of forgotten war criminals.

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You’re not going to find this level of detail anywhere else on this platform. Let’s go back to where it started, because this story doesn’t begin with Tanaka. It begins with an empire running out of options. September 18th, 1931. Manchuria, northeastern China. Japan in the early 1930s was an industrial powerhouse sitting on almost nothing.

No significant oil reserves, no rubber, barely enough coal to keep factories running. Meanwhile, just across the border sat Manchuria, a region overflowing with the exact resources Japan desperately needed. Iron ore, coal, timber, arable land for a growing population. So, when Japanese military officers in the Kwantung Army wanted an excuse to seize the region, they didn’t wait for Tokyo’s permission.

They manufactured a crisis. Officers planted a small explosive charge next to their own railway tracks near Mukden. The damage to the rails was almost cosmetic. Trains ran again within hours. But, the story Japan told the world was very different. Chinese saboteurs had attacked Japanese infrastructure, and retaliation was justified.

Within days, Japanese forces seized Mukden and began rolling across the region. By February 1932, all of Manchuria belonged to Japan. A puppet state called Manchukuo was installed with a figurehead emperor and Japanese officers pulling every real lever of power. It would survive until Japan’s surrender in 1945, a full 14 years built on one staged explosion.

Historians still call this the Mukden Incident, and it’s widely considered the opening act of World War II in the Pacific years before Pearl Harbor made headlines in the West. Fast forward to the night of July 7th, 1937. A Japanese army unit on maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge, just outside Beijing, claimed one of their soldiers had briefly gone missing.

They demanded to enter a nearby walled Chinese town to search for him. The Chinese garrison stationed there refused entry. A single gunshot rang out in the darkness. To this day, no one knows with certainty which side fired first, but that one shot, whoever pulled the trigger, ignited the Second Sino-Japanese War, an 8-year conflict that would eventually merge into the broader chaos of World War II and wouldn’t end until Japan’s unconditional surrender in September 1945.

Japanese forces moved with terrifying speed. Beijing fell almost immediately. Then came Shanghai, and what followed there was nothing like the quick, decisive victories Japan expected. The Battle of Shanghai raged for 105 brutal days, involving nearly 1 million troops from both sides. Historians later nicknamed it Stalingrad on the Yangtze for its house-to-house intensity, its staggering casualty count, and the sheer stubbornness of Chinese resistance against a technologically superior invader.

A young company commander named Gunkichi Tanaka fought in that meat grinder, leading men in the 6th Division’s 45th Regiment. He survived Shanghai. What he did in the months that followed would define and ultimately end his life. General Iwane Matsui had one target left on the map, Nanjing, China’s capital, sitting 300 km inland along the Yangtze River.

Matsui was convinced that capturing the capital would shatter Chiang Kai-shek’s government entirely and force a quick Japanese victory. As Japanese troops advanced from Shanghai toward Nanjing, reports of atrocities began traveling faster than the army itself. Two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, turned mass killing into a public spectacle.

A documented contest to see who could behead 100 people first using only a sword. This wasn’t rumor or exaggeration. Tokyo newspapers actually published score updates on the contest, treating human slaughter like a baseball box score for readers back home. By the time Japanese forces reached Nanjing’s gates on December 9th, 1937, three-quarters of the city’s population had already fled westward.

The wealthy left first in private cars and hired trucks. The middle class followed on foot and by cart. Those left behind were largely the poorest residents, including the ethnic Tanka boat-dwelling community, who had nowhere to go and no means to get there. A small group of foreign residents, including a German businessman and Nazi Party member named John Rabe, organized something remarkable under the circumstances, the Nanjing Safety Zone, a designated neutral area meant to shelter civilians from the coming violence. It ultimately protected

roughly 250,000 Chinese civilians. There’s a strange, almost impossible irony buried here. A card-carrying Nazi became one of the war’s most effective protectors of Chinese lives using his party membership as leverage with Japanese commanders, while his own government committed genocide in ocean away in Europe.

Japan dropped surrender leaflets over the city giving the defenders 24 hours to comply warning explicitly that refusal meant no mercy. No formal response came by the deadline. On December 13th, Japanese forces including Captain Gunkichi Tanaka entered the city through its shattered gates. What followed over the next 6 weeks has almost no equal in modern history.

Conservative estimates place the death toll at 300,000 civilians and disarmed soldiers though the true number will never be confirmed. The chaos, mass graves, and destroyed records made an accurate count impossible even at the time. Chinese men of fighting age were rounded up by the thousands on mere suspicion of having served as soldiers.

Many were innocent civilians misidentified in the panic and confusion of a collapsing city. Thousands were marched to the banks of the Yangtze River and machine-gunned in groups. Others were killed with landmines then set ablaze with fuel. Survivors who somehow lived through the initial attack were finished off with bayonets.

Tanaka himself used his personal sword nicknamed Sukehiro as if it were a beloved companion rather than an instrument of slaughter to kill more than 300 people many of them by beheading. A wartime propaganda book titled Imperial Soldiers even published a photograph of him mid-execution framed proudly as an act of heroism for Japanese readers back home.

Ordinary citizens in Tokyo opened newspapers over breakfast and saw this glorified as patriotic duty. The sexual violence during this period reached a scale historians still struggle to fully document. Estimates range from 20,000 to 80,000 women raped some as young as children some elderly. Soldiers moved door-to-door hunting for victims systematically.

One former Japanese soldier, Shiro Azuma, later gave chilling, unfiltered testimony about the mentality inside these units, describing how the violence became routine, almost bureaucratic, because silence and death protected the perpetrators from accountability. In the war’s darkest documented moments, families were forced into unthinkable acts against one another.

None of it was punished at the time. Instead, the Japanese military’s official institutional response was to formalize and expand wartime brothels. Roughly 1/3 of Nanjing burned to the ground during this period, the fires visible for miles. By February 1938, the killing finally slowed as a Chinese-led, Japanese-controlled puppet government was installed.

The world had just witnessed one of the 20th century’s darkest chapters, and for nearly a decade afterward, most of the men directly responsible walked free, protected by silence, bureaucracy, and a war that had far bigger battles left to fight. Justice delayed. Tanaka wasn’t even on the original list of war criminals compiled after Japan’s surrender.

He nearly escaped accountability entirely, slipping back into civilian life while the world moved on to rebuilding. Then in April 1947, Chinese officials formally requested his extradition. Armed with photographic evidence and eyewitness testimony collected over the preceding decade, on May 14th, 1947, the request was approved by the War Criminals Commission.

Four days later, he was in Chinese custody. By December, he stood trial in Nanjing, in the very city where he’d once wielded that sword. Prosecutors combined his case with Mukai and Noda’s, the same two officers behind the infamous beheading contest that Tokyo newspapers had once covered like a sporting event.

Tanaka’s legal defense was almost laughably weak under scrutiny. He claimed the execution photograph published in Imperial Soldiers couldn’t be authentic because the victims were wearing short sleeves and the massacre had occurred in December during winter. Prosecutors simply pointed out the obvious.

Soldiers routinely remove their jackets while committing acts of physical violence. The argument collapsed almost immediately under cross-examination. Tanaka then pivoted to outright denial insisting the entire book was fabricated propaganda designed to manufacture his reputation as a war hero swearing before all the gods of heaven and earth that he had no connection whatsoever to the rape of Nanjing.

The tribunal didn’t believe a single word of it. On January 28th, 1948 Gunkichi Tanaka Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda were marched into the mountains of the Yuhuatai District and executed by firing squad. Mukai and Noda were both 35 years old. Tanaka was 42. No one mourned him. No one spoke publicly in his defense.

The man who once posed proudly with a sword in his hand died facing rifles and history recorded his death without a shred of sympathy. Here’s the uncomfortable truth. The Rape of Nanjing remains one of the least discussed atrocities of World War II in Western education despite a death toll that rivals and by some historical estimates exceeds entire nation’s wartime losses combined.

Japan’s official acknowledgement of the massacre remains a politically contested issue across East Asia even today. Nearly 90 years after it happened. That’s exactly the kind of history this channel exists to uncover. Not sanitized not softened for comfort. The real documented uncomfortable truth.

Because forgetting events like this is precisely how atrocities become forgotten footnotes instead of lasting warnings for the future. If this story hit you the way it hit our research team while putting this episode together, do three things right now. Subscribe to Untold War Story, hit that bell so you never miss what’s coming next, and drop a comment telling us which buried war story deserves to be uncovered next.

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