25 Facts About Ikuhiko Hata

Ikuhiko Hata earned his PhD at the University of Tokyo and has taught history at several universities.

Ikuhiko Hata is the author of a number of influential and well-received scholarly works, particularly on topics related to Japan's role in the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.

Ikuhiko Hata has written extensively on such controversial subjects as the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women.

Ikuhiko Hata was born on 12 December 1932 in the city of Hofu in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Ikuhiko Hata graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956 and received his PhD there in 1974.

Ikuhiko Hata worked as chief historian of the Japanese Ministry of Finance between 1956 and 1976 and during this period from 1963 to 1965 he was a research assistant at Harvard University.

Ikuhiko Hata has been described by numerous historians as an important scholar on the history of modern Japan.

Ikuhiko Hata's first published history book was Nicchu Sensoshi, released in 1961, which he began researching while completing his bachelor's degree at the University of Tokyo.

In 1993 Ikuhiko Hata wrote a two-volume work on controversial incidents in modern Japanese history, entitled Showashi no nazo wo ou, which was awarded the Kikuchi Kan Prize.

Ikuhiko Hata's major contribution to Nanjing Massacre studies is his book Nankin jiken, published in 1986, which is a detailed study of the event based on Japanese, Chinese, and English sources that was later noted by historians such as Daqing Yang to be one of the few impartial works of scholarship written on the massacre during the period.

Ikuhiko Hata's book is acknowledged as the first to discuss what might have caused the massacre, whereas previous books had focused only on the event itself.

Ikuhiko Hata argued that the Japanese Army's lack of military police and facilities to detain POWs, its ignorance of international laws, and the Chinese General Tang Shengzhi's decision to flee the city without formally surrendering, which left large number of plain-clothes soldiers within the civilian population which was followed by excessive mopping-up operations by the Japanese, among the factors which led to the slaughter.

Bob Wakabayashi of York University argues that Ikuhiko Hata became more strident in his tone following these attacks, once calling it the "Nanking industry" in comparison with Norman Finkelstein's "Holocaust industry".

Ikuhiko Hata is a leading historian on the subject of the comfort women who served alongside the Japanese Army in the 1930s and 1940s and is credited with being the first to expose as fraudulent the testimony of Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have kidnapped Korean women for the Japanese military.

Historian Chunghee Sarah Soh notes that Ikuhiko Hata had put the total number of comfort women at 90,000 in 1993 but he later revised the number downward because of "his political alignment with the conservative anti-redress camp in Japan that emerged in the latter half of the 1990s".

Ikuhiko Hata would expand his research into the 1999 book Ianfu to senjo no sei, described by Sarah Soh as "a 444-page treatise on the comfort women issue".

In 2015 Ikuhiko Hata led of group of Japanese historians in requesting that the publisher McGraw-Hill make corrections to what they believed were erroneous descriptions of the comfort women in a world history textbook published in the United States.

Takao Yamada likewise points out that Ikuhiko Hata has criticized all sides in historical controversies and he argues that Ikuhiko Hata can be better described as a "positivist".

Ikuhiko Hata is known as a strong opponent of the attempts by some Japanese nationalists to revise Japan's wartime history in a way that he deems ideologically biased.

In 1995 Ikuhiko Hata stepped down from a government commission on the construction of a new war museum near Yasukuni Shrine in fear that the project would be used to glorify Japan's wartime actions.

Ikuhiko Hata favors the de-enshrinement of war criminals from Yasukuni Shrine and is a critic of Yushukan, a museum near the shrine, for its nationalist-inspired portrayal of Japanese history.

Ikuhiko Hata has supported the work of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, despite noting that the textbook which the Society had authored "was colored more strongly by nationalism than others".

In 2007 Ikuhiko Hata was vocal in his denunciation of an essay written by Toshio Tamogami, a former general in the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, which sought to justify Japanese imperialism.

Ikuhiko Hata found Tamogami's essay to be "of extremely low quality" and full of "old conspiracy theories".

Ikuhiko Hata has been married to Kazuko Matsumura since 9 September 1973 and has one daughter, Mineko.