Some contemporary researchers including the historian Tomio Hora and the journalist Katsuichi Honda expressed strong disagreement with Hata's death toll estimate, though both expressed admiration for Hata's scholarship and sincerity. Hata is today recognized as the major scholar of the so-called "centrist" school of thought on the Nanking Massacre, which in terms of the death toll believes that tens of thousands were killed and thus stands between the "great massacre" school which believes that hundreds of thousands were killed, and the "illusion" school of Nanking Massacre deniers. By contrast, Takuji Kimura has criticized Hata as a "minimizer" of the atrocity, while still acknowledging that his book on the massacre was "an excellent study" and Herbert Bix has described him as "the most notorious" of the "partial deniers" of the Nanking Massacre. However, historians Haruo Tohmatsu and H. P. Willmott have stated that Hata's estimate for the death toll is regarded in Japan as being "the most academically reliable estimate".