Tanaka Memorial

The Tanaka Memorial (田中上奏文, Tanaka Jōsōbun^?) is an alleged Japanese strategic planning document from 1927 in which Prime Minister Baron Tanaka Giichi laid out for Emperor Hirohito a strategy to take over the world. The authenticity of the document was long accepted and is still quoted in some Chinese textbooks, but historian John Dower concludes that "most scholars now agree that it was a masterful anti-Japanese hoax."

The Tanaka Memorial was first published in the December 1929 edition of the Chinese publication "時事月報" (Current Affairs Monthly) in Nanking, a Nationalist Chinese publication. It was reproduced on 24 September 1931 on pp. 923–34 of China Critic, an English publication in Shanghai. The memorial contains the assertions:

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.

The English translation of this document was in circulation before February 1934, and formed the foundation of the lead article on the front page of the first edition of The Plain Truth magazine published by Herbert W. Armstrong in February of that year, although it had first appeared in the less widely circulated Communist International magazine in 1931.

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