SDHF Newsletter No.417 The Road to the Greater East Asian War No. 32 Ch.9-4

THE ROAD TO THE GREATER EAST ASIAN WAR
Nakamura Akira, Dokkyo University Professor Emeritus
(English Translation: Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact)
Part 32, Chapter 9: Contending with Attempts to Communize China-IV

November 8, 2024

In December 1929 a mysterious document called the “Tanaka Memorial”, supposedly written by Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi and secretly submitted to Emperor Showa, appeared in Current Affairs Monthly, a magazine published in Nanjing, in Chinese, more than two years after Tanaka “wrote” it. The document subsequently metamorphosed into an English-language pamphlet, which was disseminated all over the world. One would expect to locate the original Japanese text of any memorial to the Emperor, even a draft, but no trace of the document in question has ever been found.

Accordingly, the memorial was suspect from the outset, but since it was promoted, time and again, as the consummate anti-Japanese resource, it took on a life of its own, acquiring historical gravitas. In February 1930, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, having concluded the Tanaka Memorial was a fake, filed a protest to the Nationalist government.

There is no shortage of reasons on which to base the conclusion that the document was a forgery; several convincing examples follow.

(1) The memorial has Yamagata Aritomo attending a meeting convened in late November 1922 to find a solution to the problems posed by the Nine-Power Treaty. Yamagata died on February 1, 1922.
(2) According to the memorial, Tanaka Giichi was dispatched to Europe and the US. But in 1922 his only foreign destination was the Philippines.
(3) The perpetrators of the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Tanaka Giichi in Shanghai were not Chinese, but Koreans.
(4) The Fengtian-Jilin Line, already in operation according to the memorial, was not completed until May, 1929.
(5) Memorials were customarily not addressed to any individual. They were delivered to the Emperor by the Lord Keeper of Privy Seal. The Tanaka Memorial is addressed to the Imperial Household Minister.

When the League of Nations was debating the Manchurian Incident at the 69th session of the Council of the League of Nations in November 1932, Wellington Koo, a Chinese delegate, referred to the Tanaka Memorial. When Matsuoka Yōsuke, representing Japan, pressed Koo on the document’s authenticity, the latter’s argument was, “In my opinion, however, the best proof on this question is really the whole situation in Manchuria today.” When it proved difficult to ascertain that the memorial existed, the Chinese resorted to a bizarre logic that conflated the past and future. They insisted that the document was authentic on the basis of subsequent developments (which were, in fact, far removed from the content of the memorial) both at the time of the Manchurian Incident.

We should not dismiss this as a forgettable episode in history: The fabricated memorial was used, even at the IMTFE, as prosecution evidence and appears in Chinese school textbooks even today.

URL: 　 https://www.sdh-fact.com/book-article/2255/
PDF: https://www.sdh-fact.com/CL/Road32E.pdf

MOTEKI Hiromichi, Chairman
Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact