Tomio Hora (洞富雄, ''Hora Tomio'', (born 14 November 1906 in Higashichikuma District,

Nagano Prefecture is a landlocked prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshū. Nagano Prefecture has a population of 2,052,493 () and has a geographic area of . Nagano Prefecture borders Niigata Prefecture to the north, Gunma Prefecture to the ...

, modern-day Chikuhoku; died 15 March 2000) was a Japanese historian and

Waseda University , abbreviated as , is a private university, private research university in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Founded in 1882 as the ''Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō'' by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the school was formally renamed Waseda University in 1902. The university has numerou ...

professor, well known for his pioneering work on the

Nanjing Massacre The Nanjing Massacre (, ja, 南京大虐殺, Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as ''Nanking'') was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Ba ...

Education

Hora attended middle school at Matsumoto Kukashi High School () and high school at Waseda University High School (). He was a graduate of

's literature department. He received his

Doctor of Letters Doctor of Letters (D.Litt., Litt.D., Latin: ' or ') is a terminal degree in the humanities that, depending on the country, is a higher doctorate after the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree or equivalent to a higher doctorate, such as the Doctor ...

from Waseda.

Nanjing Massacre

In 1972, Hora published his seminal ''Nankin Jiken'', in which he refuted revisionist denial of the

Nanking Massacre The Nanjing Massacre (, ja, 南京大虐殺, Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as ''Nanking'') was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Ba ...

.Takashi Yoshida. ''The making of the "Rape of Nanking"''. 2006, page 87 The work updated his 1967 ''Kindai senshi no nazo'' ("Riddles of Modern War History"). This detailed treatment of the incident was a meaningful, in-depth response to revisionist accounts of Imperial Japanese action in China. Hora's ''Nankin Jiken'' appeared amidst controversy in regards to the Nanjing Massacre scholarship of Honda Katsuichi, whose ''Chugoku no tabi'' ("Travels in China") recorded Chinese eyewitness accounts of Japanese wartime atrocities.Fogel, Joshua A. ''The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography''. 2000, page 80-84 Honda's account garnered much support and stimulated debate in Japan, while at the same time attracting fearsome nationalistic defenses of Japanese military activity in the period, which materialized as historical debates, rhetorical attacks, and personal threats. Hora's ''Nankin Jiken'' then appeared, which bolstered Honda's interview-based research with a documentary record, answering various attempts to undercut the Nanjing Massacre in Japanese historiography. Throughout the 1970s, Hora continued his struggle against revisionist works, publishing a number of scholarly monographs and documents on the events of the war. In 1984, he became a founding member of the Study Group on the Nanking Incident, a diverse group of scholars, lawyers, and teachers, who held a variety of views but agreed that "they had to face the past wrongs committed by Japan".Fogel, Joshua A. ''The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography''. 2000, page 89 The organization's stated goal was the advancement of historical consciousness in Japan, in order to construct a "fortress for peace".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hora Toshio 1906 births 2000 deaths 20th-century Japanese historians Nanjing Massacre Waseda University alumni