still preserving the overall tone and import of the novel. The novel was published in 1938 but was pulled from circulation within days; Ishikawa was sentenced to a four-month prison term for disturbing "peace and order". Controversy and confusion over the Nanjing massacre occurred even soon after, in 1943 George Orwell wrote in Looking Back on the Spanish War: "Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them ... There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China ... The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads—they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because The Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late." It was not until the Tokyo Trial (tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) and the Nanjing Trial that the truth of the Nanjing Massacre was first revealed to Japanese civilians. The atrocities revealed during the trials shocked Japanese society at the time. Postwar In the 1950s, author Yoshie Hotta wrote a series of pieces of historical fiction about the atrocities in Nanjing. In 1967, Tomio Hora published his seminal account "Nankin Jiken" ("Nanjing Incident") in which he refuted revisionist denial of the massacre. This detailed treatment of the incident was the first meaningful and in-depth description of the massacre in Japanese postwar historiography. Some leftwing Japanese journalists of the decade were inspired by the American war in Vietnam to research the events. International interest in the Nanjing Massacre waned into near obscurity until 1972, the year China and Japan normalized diplomatic relations. Discussion of wartime atrocities developed considerably in this period. The Chinese government's statements about the events were attacked by Japanese diplomats, because they relied on personal testimonies and anecdotal evidence. Also coming under attack were the burial records and photographs presented in the Tokyo War Crime Court, which were said to be fabrications by the Chinese government, artificially manipulated or incorrectly attributed