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. In 2000 Marius Jansen endorsed it as "the most reasonable of many Japanese studies" on the massacre and in 2001 prominent Nanjing Massacre scholar Yutaka Yoshida deemed it one of the top five books he recommends that people read on the Nanjing Massacre, despite disagreeing with its death toll estimate. In 2003 Joshua Fogel called the book "still an authority in the field", and Ritsumeikan University professor David Askew designated it "the best introductory work on the Nanjing Incident in any language". By 1999 the book was in its nineteenth printing. In November 1997 at a conference in Princeton University Hata was confronted by Iris Chang, author of the book The Rape of Nanking, who asked him why he doubted the testimony of Japanese POWs who had stated that hundreds of thousands of Chinese were killed in the atrocity. When Hata replied that torture and coercion of Japanese POWs made their testimony unreliable Chang walked out and the audience became unruly, shouting Hata down and yelling insults at him. The moderator Perry Link barely kept the situation under control. In the wake of this incident, similar disruptions by Chinese students who disagreed with his death toll estimate prevented Hata from speaking at a number of universities that he visited. Bob Wakabayashi of York University argues that Hata became more strident in his tone following these attacks, once calling it the "Nanking industry" in comparison with Norman Finkelstein's "Holocaust industry". In the 1980s Hata had stated that the death toll was 38,000 to 42,000 while holding out the possibility that it might have been as high as 60,000, but when he wrote the second edition of Nankin Jiken in 2007 he indicated that 42,000 massacred was the maximum possible and that the true number might have been lower. Research on comfort women Ikuhiko Hata is a leading historian on the subject of the