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The Tanaka Memorial is allegedly a Japanese war planning document from 1927, in which Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi supposedly laid out for the Emperor of Japan Hirohito the strategy to take over the world. Its authenticity is still a matter of dispute, although in the broad strokes, the strategy was followed by Japan during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. Its strategy may be summarized by the lines (which do not appear literally in the document):

"Tanaka Memorial", New York, Chinese Student Patriotic Association of America, probably published between 1938-1941.

In order to take over the world, you need to take over China;
In order to take over China, you need to take over Manchuria (Northeastern China) 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.

It was depicted by United States wartime propaganda as a sort of Japanese answer to Mein Kampf. The Battle of China, one of Frank Capra's movie series Why We Fight (given the Academy Award as a documentary), describes the Tanaka Memorial as the document that was the Japanese plan for war with the United States.

As presented in Battle of China, the four sequential steps to achieve Japan's goal of conquests are

1. Conquest of Manchuria (North-eastern China)
2. Conquest of China
3. Establishment of bases in the Pacific
4. Conquest of the United States

Even though it is now widely regarded as a fake, the memorial was believed as real in the 1930s and 40s because Japan's actions appeared to correspond to these plans. Actions such as the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, 1937 invasion of China, and the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent Pacific War seemed to confirm this suspicion.^[1]

When the Allies searched for documents following the war, they did not find the Tanaka Memorial among them. Most academic historians regard the Memorial as a forgery and rank it somewhere between the Zinoviev letter and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^{[citation needed]}

The origin of the memorial is still unknown. However, the Japanese government obtained information as early as 1929 that Chinese representatives were trying to submit a document relating to Japanese foreign policy, attributed to Tanaka, to the third meeting of Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR)^{[citation needed]}. Upon close examination of the document, which was written in Chinese, it was revealed that the document contained a number of factual errors. For example, the memorial mentioned Yamagata Aritomo attending negotiations of the Nine Power Treaty. But he was already dead by the time that the meeting had taken place. There are numerous errors, some of which involve the career of Tanaka himself, including his trips to Europe and North America. The Japanese representative under direction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs intended to expose the document as a forgery at the IPR. However, the Chinese representative refrained from submitting the memorial. This is the first mention of the Tanaka Memorial in official records.

The document gained its first publicity when it was published in the 1929, December edition of China Critic (Current Affair Monthly, 時事月報) in Nanking, a Nationalist Chinese publication. The English translation of this document was in circulation before February 1934, because it 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. (See [1].) From the 1960s onwards, Armstrong referenced this same article in his autobiography and he did not disavow it, even though, in his book, he claims that he became friends with members of the Japanese Diet (including Prime Ministers) and established a relationship with the brother of Hirohito.

Because the initial edition of the memorial was in Chinese, the forgery is attributed to Chinese sources. However, there have been claims of forgery by the Soviet Union to encourage war between China and Japan, and so to advance Soviet interests. Some internal evidence, however, for example a reference to conspiring with Russia against Japan, does argue against its being Soviet propaganda.

School textbooks in China still mention the Memorial, without stating the document to be a forgery.^{[citation needed]}

• Blood on the Sun

These sources deny the authenticity of the Memorial:

• encyclopedia.com
• Japan Speaks about Conspiracy of Japan in 1932 (revealed by Kiyoshi Kawakami)
• Conspiracy of Japan in the Tokyo Trial

These sources accept the authenticity of the Memorial:

• The Tanaka Memorial (complete text) Japan's Plan For Conquest
• Viking Phoenix Web Page Japan, Incorporated - Tanaka Memorial
• Profound lessons in past incidents (a mirror of Chinese statement page of 1997)

• Stein, Gordon Encyclopedia of Hoaxes, Gale Group, 1993. (On itself) ISBN 0-8103-8414-0
• Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, Pantheon Books, 1986. (On US propaganda) ISBN 0-394-50030-X ISBN 0-394-75172-8
• Harries, Meirion & Susie, Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarization of Japan, New York: Macmillan, 1987. (On the Tokyo Trial and the Memorial) ISBN 0-02-548340-4 ISBN 0-241-12111-6 ISBN 0-434-31378-5
• Allen S. Whiting, China Eyes Japan, University of California Press, 1989. ISBN 0-520-06511-5