Yoshiaki Itakura


Yoshiaki Itakura was a Japanese researcher of military history born in Kanagawa Prefecture. He is most well known for his research on the Nanjing Massacre and was a member of a committee assembled by Kaikosha to study the incident.
He graduated from the faculty of engineering at Yokohama National University and was manager of Itakura factories.
In addition to his business, he wrote and spoke on military history, the Japanese history textbook controversies, the comfort women, and especially the Nanjing Massacre. He estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 Chinese were massacred in Nanjing and consistently criticized advocates of the great massacre school such as those who accepted the line of the Chinese government that 300,000 had been murdered.
Itakura was on good terms with the historian Ikuhiko Hata while still publicly arguing with him. He was also a friend of Masaaki Tanaka though he had exposed his fraudulent tampering of the diary of Iwane Matsui.
Itakura died of liver failure in 1999.

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