The Tanaka Memorial
The Far East had a propensity for creating their black propaganda during WWII. A document passed around Asia gave a detailed description outlining Japan’s quest for China.
The Tanaka Memorial was first published in Nanking, China. It reads a little like a haiku version of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto:
In order to take over the world, you need to take over Asia;
In order to take over Asia, you need to take over China;
In order to take over China, you need to take over Manchuria and Mongolia.
If we succeed in conquering China, the rest of the Asiatic countries and the South Sea countries will fear us and surrender to us.
Then the world will realize that Eastern Asia is ours.
An English version of the Tanaka Memorial made its way into mass circulation and thus inspired a group to erect a publication putting the document front and center in The Plain Truth. The manifesto reached a small number of people through Communist International just three years earlier, in 1931. The western world saw it as a Mein Kampf-inspired composition, and film director Frank Capra used his film, Why We Fight, to speculate the document was a Japanese blueprint for invading the United States.
Many during 1930s and 1940s saw parallels between the document and Japan’s actions, making it seem plausible that The Tanaka Memorial was not black propaganda. On the contrary, it was chillingly authentic. In 1940, Leon Trotsky wrote and published an article describing how the document came to be discovered first by Soviet intelligence agencies; a highly positioned spy in Tokyo obtained it and leaked it to China as to not risk compromising his or her identity.
The document’s origins remain shrouded in mystery. Is the Tanaka Memorial real or fake? Many argue that Japan is too much of a fact-based a society to have created something altogether false. Other schools of through speculate that the Memorial is a forgery, created to offset Japan’s intention that was reached through a 1927 conference where Japan pledged to support the Chinese government in order to weaken Chinese communists. Some schools of thought point out that the document never surfaced in the Japanese language, but only in Chinese, which makes people believe that the document originated in China.