This historiography is disparate and sometimes contested, owing to conflicting currents of Chinese and Japanese nationalist sentiment and national interest, as well as the fog of war.
[citation needed] While mainly written by non-academic lay authors, revisionist works of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan have been increasingly vocal in the past years[when?]
Despite many failed attempts for a collaboration, Japan and China have been unable to agree upon the death toll of the massacre, and the debate remains a cornerstone of the current instability in the far east Asian geopolitics.
[citation needed] In the 1950s, author Yoshie Hotta wrote a series of pieces of historical fiction about the atrocities in Nanjing.
In 1967, Tomio Hora published his seminal account "Nankin Jiken" ("Nanjing Incident") in which he refuted revisionist denial of the massacre.
[6] International interest in the Nanjing Massacre waned into near obscurity until 1972, the year China and Japan normalized diplomatic relations.
The Chinese government's statements about the events were attacked by Japanese diplomats, because they relied on personal testimonies and anecdotal evidence.
Also coming under attack were the burial records and photographs presented in the Tokyo War Crime Court, which were said to be fabrications by the Chinese government, artificially manipulated or incorrectly attributed to the Nanjing Massacre.
Japanese nationalist responses answering this publication included the influential articles of Shichihei Yamamoto, "Reply to Katsuichi Honda",[8] and Akira Suzuki, "The Phantom of The Nanjing Massacre".
The Nanjing Massacre was characterized as a minor incident which was sparked by the frustration of Japanese soldiers at meeting strong resistance from the Chinese Army.
In the 1990s, the stance of the Japanese government began to change as three consecutive prime ministers sought reconciliation with other Asian countries by acknowledging Japan's responsibility for the war.
[12] Immediately after taking office in 1993, Hosokawa Morihiro, prime minister of the first non-Liberal Democratic Party government, characterized Japan's expansion through Asia in the 1930s and 1940s as an "aggressive war".
Research of burial records and documents, as well as interviews, confirmed a figure of 300,000 dead Chinese in the course of the massacre, thus corroborating the findings of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
In Japan, a variety of new evidence was published, including the private journals of commanding Japanese generals as well as those of many ordinary soldiers.
In addition, a number of Japanese veterans began openly to admit to having committed or witnessed atrocities in the Nanjing area.
Some of his researches were published in Shūkan Kin'yōbi and were saluted as the first work on Nanjing Massacre solely based on Japanese sources.
In a 1990 paper entitled The Nanking Massacre and the Nanking Population, Sun Zhai-wei of the Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences estimated the total number of people killed at 377,400, combining Chinese burial records and estimates totaling 150,000 given by Japanese Imperial Army major Ohta Hisao in a confessional report about the Japanese army's disposal efforts of dead bodies.
Among these were General Nagano Shigeto, a World War II veteran and a former chief of staff of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force who was appointed justice minister in spring of 1994.
The debate has shifted mainly to the death toll, to the extent of rapes and civilian killings (as opposed to POW and suspected guerrillas) and to the appropriateness of using the word "massacre".
In response, two Japanese organizations have taken the lead in publishing material detailing the massacre and collecting related documents and accounts.
In 2007, a group of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication, arguing that there was no evidence to prove the allegations of mass killings by Japanese soldiers.