Ikuhiko Hata

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.

He has written extensively on such controversial subjects as the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women. He does not believe that comfort women were coerced by the Japanese military to work. Fellow historian Edward Drea has called him "the doyen of Japanese military historians". Hata is variously regarded as being a "conservative" historian or a "centrist". Provided by Wikipedia