Just as Honda, in writing about the Vietnam War, had sought to narrate the war "through Asian Eyes", his scholarship on Imperial Japanese action in China sought to depict Japanese aggression from a Chinese perspective. The text stimulated much interest and debate, and had both supporters and detractors. Among the more intense rebuttals to the text was that of , a World War II veteran and popular commentator, who attacked in particular an account recorded by Honda of a contest to kill Chinese people using swords. The contest would become a favorite target of revisionist writers in regards to the Nanking Massacre, in later years. Tomio Hora answered skepticism of the account with subsequent scholarship. Detailed research by Wakabayashi subsequently claimed that the competition was indeed a press fabrication of the time.