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". 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. 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. 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". 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. 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. Hata's second book, the 1962 work Gun fashizumu undō shi ("A History of the Military Fascist Movement"), was