Ikuhiko Hata

Ikuhiko Hata (秦 郁彦) is a Japanese historian.

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

He 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.

Hata is variously regarded as being a "conservative" historian or a "centrist".

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

Fellow historian Edward Drea has called him "the doyen of Japanese military historians".

The work was well-received, described by Chalmers Johnson as "the most thorough study of Japanese policies in China during the 1930s" and by James T.C. Liu as "a welcome and pioneering contribution".

Fifty years after its publication Edward Drea and Tobe Ryoichi called it "a classic account" of the war.

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

Roger Dingman described the first, "The Japanese-Soviet Confrontation, 1935–1939", as "a wealth of new data", and praised the second, "The Army's Move into Northern Indochina", for demonstrating "brilliantly how peaceful passage through northern Indochina became forceful occupation".

Mark Peattie wrote that Hata's third essay, "The Marco Polo Bridge Incident 1937", was "the best overview we now have in English" of the event, and Hata would later expand it into a full-length book which Edward Drea and Tobe Ryoichi called "the single best source on the incident".

The book is known for its relatively low estimate of the death toll, which Hata put at up to 40,000 because he based the number of civilian killing on the work of Lewis S. C. Smythe who conducted a survey of the massacre in the immediate aftermath (War Damage in Nanking Area, Dec.1937 to March 1938, Urban and Rural Surveys) and also exclude Chinese soldiers.

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.

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.

Some contemporary researchers including the historian Tomio Hora and the journalist Katsuichi Honda expressed strong disagreement with Hata's death toll estimate, though both expressed admiration for Hata's scholarship and sincerity.

Hata is today recognized as the major scholar of the so-called "centrist" school of thought on the Nanjing Massacre, which in terms of the death toll believes that tens of thousands were killed and thus stands between the "great massacre" school which believes that hundreds of thousands were killed, and the "illusion" school of Nanjing Massacre deniers.

By contrast, Takuji Kimura has criticized Hata as a "minimizer" of the atrocity, while still acknowledging that his book on the massacre was "an excellent study" and Herbert Bix has described him as "the most notorious" of the "partial deniers" of the Nanjing Massacre.

However, historians Haruo Tohmatsu and H. P. Willmott have stated that Hata's estimate for the death toll is regarded in Japan as being "the most academically reliable estimate".

Hata's Nankin jiken has continued to receive plaudits from some scholars.

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

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

Hata's first published history book was Nicchū Sensōshi ("A History of the Second Sino-Japanese War"), released in 1961, which he began researching while completing his bachelor's degree at the University of Tokyo.

Hata's second book, the 1962 work Gun fashizumu undō shi ("A History of the Military Fascist Movement"), was promoted by the historian Shuhei Domon as "a first-rate narrative interpretation based on extensive use of documentary evidence."

The selected Hata for a part of what historian James William Morley described as a team of "young, objective diplomatic and military historians" to be given unprecedented access to primary source records to write the history of the origins of World War II in Asia.

The result was Taiheiyō sensō e no michi ("The Road to the Pacific War"), published between 1962 and 1963 and then translated into English in the 1970s and 1980s.

Hata contributed three essays to the series.

Starting in 1968 Hata headed a team of scholars with a task from the Ministry of Education to analyze all available sources and documents on the workings of the wartime and prewar armed forces of Japan.

The fruit of their research was Nihon Rikukaigun no Seido, Soshiki, Jinji ("Institutions, Organization, and Personnel of the Japanese Army and Navy"), released in 1971, which Mark Peattie called "the authoritative reference work in the field".

Soon after Hata was tasked with coordinating another collaborative research project, this one for the Finance Ministry, on the subject of the occupation of Japan by the United States after World War II.

John W. Dower, Sadao Asada, and Roger Dingman credited Hata for the key role he played in producing the multivolume project, which began to be published in 1975, and deemed it the best work of scholarship on the occupation produced until that point.

After resigning his post at the Finance Ministry Hata served as a visiting professor at Princeton University from 1977 to 1978 and then was a history professor at Takushoku University from 1980 to 1993, at Chiba University from 1994 to 1997, and at Nihon University from 1997 to 2002.

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

Historian Edward Drea has called him "the doyen of Japanese military historians", and has written that Hata's "published works are models of scholarship, research, accuracy, and judicious interpretation", and Joshua A. Fogel, a historian of China at York University, concurs that Hata "is an eminent scholar who has for over forty years been writing numerous excellent studies of Japan at war."

Masahiro Yamamoto called him "a leading Japanese scholar in the field of Japan's modern history".

A work Hata had written in 1984, Hirohito Tennō Itsutsu no Ketsudan ("Emperor Hirohito's Five Decisions"), attracted the attention of Marius Jansen, who arranged to have it translated into English as Hirohito: The Showa Emperor in War and Peace.

According to Edward Drea, on the question of "whether the emperor was really Japan's ruler and power-holder or merely a puppet and robot ... [Hata] concludes that the answer to this complex question lies somewhere in between, although Hata credits Hirohito with considerable political savvy."

Apart from Drea the book also garnered highly positive reviews from Stephen S. Large and Hugh Cortazzi.

Hata's major contribution to Nanjing (Nanking) Massacre studies is his book Nankin jiken ("The Nanjing Incident"), 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.

In 1993 Hata wrote a two-volume work on controversial incidents in modern Japanese history, entitled Shōwashi no nazo wo ou ("Chasing the Riddles of Showa History"), which was awarded the Kikuchi Kan Prize.

Hata co-wrote two books with Yasuho Izawa on Japanese fighter aces of World War II, both of which were described by historians as the definitive treatments of the subject.