promoted by the historian Shuhei Domon as "a first-rate narrative interpretation based on extensive use of documentary evidence." The selected Hata for a part of what historian James William Morley described as a team of "young, objective diplomatic and military historians" to be given unprecedented access to primary source records to write the history of the origins of World War II in Asia. The result was Taiheiyō sensō e no michi ("The Road to the Pacific War"), published between 1962 and 1963 and then translated into English in 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", and praised the second, "The Army's Move into Northern Indochina", for demonstrating "brilliantly how peaceful passage through northern Indochina became forceful occupation". 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, and Hata would later expand it into a full-length book which Edward Drea and Tobe Ryoichi called "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". 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. 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. A work Hata had written