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.
He has written extensively on such controversial subjects as the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women. He does not believe that comfort women were coerced by the Japanese military to work. Fellow historian Edward Drea has called him "the doyen of Japanese military historians". Hata is variously regarded as being a "conservative" historian or a "centrist".
Education and career Ikuhiko Hata was born on 12 December 1932 in the city of Hōfu in Yamaguchi Prefecture. 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.Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese History, edited by Harry Wray and Hilary Conroy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 405. 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.
Scholarship Hata has been described by numerous historians as an important scholar on the history of modern Japan. Edward Drea has called him "the doyen of Japanese military historians,"Edward Drea, Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall 1853–1945 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2009), ix. and has written that Hata's "published works are models of scholarship, research, accuracy, and judicious interpretation."Edward Drea, "Book Review: Hirohito: The Showa Emperor in War and Peace," Global War Studies 8, no. 1 (2011), 172–174. Joshua A. Fogel, a historian of China at York University, called Hata "an eminent scholar who has for over forty years been writing numerous excellent studies of Japan at war." Masahiro Yamamoto called Hata "a leading Japanese scholar in the field of Japan's modern history."Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), xi.
Hata's first history book, Nicchū Sensōshi ("A History of the Second Sino-Japanese War"), was released in 1961; he began the research while completing his bachelor's degree at the University of Tokyo.Noriko Kamachi et al., Japanese Studies of Modern China Since 1953 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975), 171, 181–182. The work was well-received, described by Chalmers Johnson as "the most thorough study of Japanese policies in China during the 1930s,"Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), p. 200. and by James T.C. Liu as "a welcome and pioneering contribution."James T.C. Liu, "Book Review: A History of Japan's War in China," The Journal of Asian Studies, February 1963, 212. Fifty years after its publication, Edward Drea and Tobe Ryoichi called it "a classic account" of the war.Edward Drea and Tobe Ryoichi, "A Selected Bibliography of Japanese-Language Sources," in The Battle for China, ed. Mark Peattie et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 584. 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."Shuhei Domon, Japanese Military History: A Guide to the Literature (New York: Garland, 1984), 24.
The selected Hata to be part of what historian James William Morley described as, a team of "young, objective diplomatic and military historians," given unprecedented access to primary source records in order to write a history of the origins of the Second World War in Asia.James William Morley, "Editor's Foreword," in The China Quagmire, ed. James William Morley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), xi. The resulting study, Taiheiyō sensō e no michi ("The Road to the Pacific War"), was published between 1962 and 1963, and translated into English during the 1970s and 1980s. Hata contributed three essays to the series. Roger Dingman described the first, "The Japanese-Soviet Confrontation, 1935–1939," as "a wealth of new data,"Roger Dingman, "Book Review: Deterrent Diplomacy," The Historian, February 1978, 364. and praised the second, "The Army's Move into Northern Indochina," for demonstrating "brilliantly how peaceful passage through northern Indochina became forceful occupation."Roger Dingman, "Book Review: The Fateful Choice," The Journal of Asian Studies, November 1981, 151. 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.Mark Peattie, "Book Review: The China Quagmire," Pacific Affairs, Summer 1984, p. 328. Hata would later expand it into a full-length book, which Edward Drea and Tobe Ryoichi appraised as "the single best source on the incident."
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".Mark Peattie, "Book Review: Nihon Riku-Kaigun no Seido, Soshiki, Jinji," The Journal of Asian Studies, 1 May 1972, p. 688. 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.Roger Dingman, "Book Review: Showa Zaisei Shi," The American Historical Review, April 1978, p. 506.John Dower, "Occupied Japan as History and Occupation History as Politics," The Journal of Asian Studies, February 1975, p. 497.Sadao Asada, "Recent Works on the American Occupation of Japan: The State of the Art," Japanese Journal of American Studies 1, 1981, pp. 177–178.
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.Mark D. Roehrs and William A. Renzi, World War II In The Pacific (London: ME Sharpe, 2004), p. 130.Trevor J. Constable and Raymond F. Toliver, Fighter Aces of the USA (Fallbrook, California: Aero Publishers, 1979), p. 345.Jon Guttman, "Book Review: Japanese Army Air Force Fighter Units and Their Aces," World War II, September 2003, pp. 78–80.
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.Stephen S. Large, "Book Review: Hirohito: The Showa Emperor in War and Peace," Asian Affairs 39, no. 3 (2008), 477-478.
Nankin Jiken and Nanjing Massacre death toll estimates 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.Daqing Yang, "A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity As History", Sino-Japanese Studies, November 1990, p. 24.Edward Drea, "The Imperial Japanese Army (1868–1945)", in War in the Modern World Since 1815, ed. Jeremy Black (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 113. The book is known for its relatively low estimate of the death toll, which Hata put at up to 40,000, basing the number of deaths on the work of Lewis S. C. Smythe. Smythe's survey of the massacre, War Damage in Nanking Area, Dec.1937 to March 1938, Urban and Rural Surveys, was conducted during the immediate aftermath of the incident, and excluded the deaths of Chinese soldiers.Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the "Rape of Nanking" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 98–100.
Nankin jiken is acknowledged as the first study to discuss what might have caused the massacre, whereas previous books had focused only on the event itself. Hata considered the Japanese Army's lack of military police, facilities to detain POWs, its ignorance of international laws, along with General Tang Shengzhi's decision to flee the city without a formal surrender - leaving a large number of plain-clothed soldiers mixed in with the civilian population ahead of excessive mopping-up operations by the Japanese - as among the factors which led to the slaughter.
Some contemporary researchers, including historian Tomio Hora and journalist Katsuichi Honda, expressed strong disagreement with Hata's death toll estimate, though both expressed admiration for Hata's scholarship and sincerity.Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, "Leftover Problems", in The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 389, 393. Hata is today recognized as the major scholar of a so-called "centrist" school of thought on the Nanjing Massacre, which in terms of the death toll believes that tens of thousands were killed - thus standing between the "great massacre" school, which believes that hundreds of thousands were killed, and the "illusion" school, of Nanjing Massacre deniers.Minoru Kitamura, The Politics of Nanjing: An Impartial Investigation (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2007), 6. Takuji Kimura has criticized Hata as a "minimizer" of the atrocity, while acknowledging that his book on the massacre was "an excellent study."Takuji Kimura, "Nanking: Denial and Atonement in Contemporary Japan", in The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 331. Herbert Bix has described Hata as "the most notorious" of the "partial deniers" of the Nanjing Massacre. 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."Haruo Tohmatsu and HP Willmott, A Gathering Darkness: The Coming of War to the Far East and the Pacific (Lanham, Maryland: SR Books, 2004), p. 72.