is a historian, an authority on modern Japanese history, and is a professor of politics at the

Kanto Gakuin University is a private university located in Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, Japan. History It traces its roots to The Baptist Theological Seminary of Yokohama established by Albert Arnold Bennett, a missionary of the American Baptist Missionary Union, establis ...

. He has been conducting research on the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia,

Japanese war crimes The Empire of Japan committed war crimes in many Asian-Pacific countries during the period of Japanese militarism, Japanese imperialism, primarily during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Second Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars. These incidents have b ...

, and war crimes trials including the subject of

comfort women Comfort women or comfort girls were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II. The term "comfort women" is a translation of the Japanese '' ia ...

Education and career

Hayashi graduated from the

University of Tokyo , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...

in 1979, and then obtained master's degree from

Hitotsubashi University is a national university located in Tokyo, Japan. It has campuses in Kunitachi, Kodaira, and Chiyoda. One of the top 9 Designated National University in Japan, Hitotsubashi is a relatively small institution specialized solely in social sciences ...

. In 1985, he was accepted as a full-time lecturer in the College of Economics at the

, became an assistant professor, and was granted his current position as professor in 1999.

Historical research

Over the course of his career Hayashi has researched Japanese history during World War II. He has researched the

Sook Ching Sook Ching was a mass killing that occurred from 18 February to 4 March 1942 in Singapore after it fell to the Japanese. It was a systematic purge and massacre of 'anti-Japanese' elements in Singapore, with the Singaporean Chinese particularl ...

massacres in Singapore, discovered that US war crimes trials began on Guam before the Japanese surrender in 1945. When consulted on school textbooks, he criticised the Textbook Authorization Council for distorting passages from his 2001 book ''The Battle of Okinawa''. He argued that Okinawa residents' mass suicides were effectively under the control of the Japanese military, even if no direct orders were given. Hayashi has discovered documentary proof of Japanese military's wide and common involvement in the forced sexual slavery of the comfort women on Java in Indonesia, in Lansong Province in Vietnam, and in Guilin City in China.　 On Feb 25, 2014 Hayashi said, "The claims to inspect the credibility of the testimony made by these comfort women are intended to deny the whole existence of the comfort women itself". On April 7, 2014, Hayashi found evidence of the forced sexual slavery on Bali in Indonesia.しんぶん赤旗 2014年4月7日(月)
''

Shimbun Akahata is the daily organ of the Japanese Communist Party in the form of a national newspaper. It was founded in 1928 and currently has both daily and weekly editions.

'' Retrieved December 16, 2015

References

External links

Hayashi Hirofumi's Homepage
on Modern History and Japan's War Responsibility
Kanto Gakuin University Homepage
20th-century Japanese historians Japanese military historians Historians of Japan Battle of Okinawa Comfort women University of Tokyo alumni Hitotsubashi University alumni People from Kobe 1955 births Living people Kanto Gakuin University 21st-century Japanese historians {{Japan-historian-stub