Both also faced a vicious backlash in Japan. One vociferous critic of Hora and Honda was the ultraconservative author Suzuki Akira, who challenged their findings in an article entitled “The Illusion of the Nanjing Massacre.” Suzuki charged that some of Honda’s and Hora’s stories were fabricated, that insufficient primary source material existed to substantiate the massacre, and that the Rape of Nanking was an “illusion.” The book that resulted from his articles won the Bungei Shunju Prize in nonfiction and received eulogies from literary critics as “admirable” and “courageous.” When Hora
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