the 1930s and 1940s as an "aggressive war". Hosokawa's two successors, Hata Tsutomu and Murayama Tomiichi made similar statements. For example, Murayama Tomiichi expressed "deep remorse" for Japan's colonial rule and aggression. During this period, officially endorsed school textbooks were rewritten to reflect this changed perspective on Japan's responsibility for the war. For example, of the seven history books approved in 1997 for use in junior high schools, six cited a figure of 200,000 as the number of people killed by the Japanese military during the capture of Nanjing; four of those books also mentioned the higher Chinese estimate of 300,000 casualties. Besides total denial, another line of Japanese thought insisted that the scale of the Nanjing Massacre had been exaggerated by the Chinese. This view was expounded by Ikuhiko Hata in his book Nanjing Incident. Hata asserted that the number of victims in the Massacre was 38,000–42,000. He argued that only Chinese POWs and civilians, and not Chinese soldiers killed in action on the battlefield, should be counted as victims of the massacre. 1980s Chinese interest in the history of the massacre further developed in the 1980s. Research of burial records and documents, as well as interviews, confirmed a figure of 300,000 dead Chinese in the course of the massacre, thus corroborating the findings of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. In Japan, a variety of new evidence was published, including the private journals of commanding Japanese generals as well as those of many ordinary soldiers. Official military records of a number of the Japanese units involved also became available. In addition, a number of Japanese veterans began openly to admit to having committed or witnessed atrocities in the Nanjing area. Iris Chang mentioned important research was made out of the academic community by freelancers and reporters. She cited the works of Ono Kenji, a chemical factory worker who, from 1988 to 1994, visited 600 households, interviewed 200 persons, photocopied 20 notebooks, and conducted 7 video interviews. Some of his researches were published in Shūkan Kin'yōbi and were saluted as the first work on Nanjing Massacre solely based on Japanese sources. In 1996, he coedited a book on the subject, "living under the constant shadow of possible Japanese retaliation". Masaaki Tanaka's book "Fabrication of Nanjing Massacre" not only denied the Nanjing Massacre but laid the blame for the Sino-Japanese war on the Chinese Government. In September 1986, the Japanese education