San Francisco: Chinese National Salvation Publicity Bureau, [circa 1932].
Price: $350.00
Softcover. Offprint. Octavo. 17pp. printed in double columns. Printed blue wrappers. Small number stamped on front wrap, a bit of sunning at extremities of the wrappers, very good or better.
Likely a very early copy of the infamous "Tanaka Memorial," Japanese Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka's supposed plan for world domination, "presented" to Emperor Hirohito in 1927. According to the document, Japanese domination begins with China, and the domination of China begins in Manchuria and Mongolia. The Memorial was first printed in 1929, in a Chinese Nationalist publication. Its first appearance in English seems to be in 1931, in the *China Critic*, a Shanghai publication.
Scholars now believe that the Memorial is a clever piece of anti-Japanese propaganda, although whether it was created by Chinese nationalists, the KGB, or someone else, remains unknown. Historian Meirion Harries calls the document "one of the most successful 'dirty tricks' of the twentieth century – a bogus document so brilliantly conceived that thirty years later Westerns were still being taken in by it." (*Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Army*, 1991). An early, printing of an infamous piece of early 20th Century psychological warfare.
Item #574477
