Regarding the "Tanaka Memorial"

From:
"The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors" by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel (2000)

p520, Footnote 15

Pavlov in "Novosti Razvedki I Kontrrazvedki," 1995, no. 11–12. The Tanaka Memorial was a forgery covertly released by the Soviet Union in 1931. It was widely used to create anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States and Europe. The document was supposedly written in 1927 by Baron Tanaka, prime minister of Japan from 1927 to 1929. In addition to its many internal contradictions, its tone was wrong and would not have been written that way by a Japanese official to the emperor. Leon Trotsky also inadvertently provided the evidence that it was a forgery. Trying to bolster its authenticity, Trotsky wrote in 1940 that he had seen the document in Moscow in 1925. It had been obtained by Soviet intelligence, he claimed. ("Fourth International," New York, June 1941, "The 'Tanaka Memorial,'" by Leon Trotsky.) However, Tanaka was not prime minister until 1927, so he could not have written it in 1925. It is possible that some authentic document had been obtained from a Japanese source and was used as the exemplar to create the forgery.

The forgery first appeared in a Shanghai English-language newspaper, "The China Critic," of September 24, 1931. The editor of the paper, in answer to an inquiry, wrote that "Whilst the source of the memorial is official, and the text was disclosed at the Kyoto Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, in 1929, by one of the delegates who was for a long time a student in Japan, we regret to say that we are not in a position to disclose to you the name of the delegate, which is kept confidential by his request." (Letter of May 7, 1932).

The introduction to a 1942 Communist Party USA version of the "document" says that it first came to light in 1929 after it was purchased by Chang Hsueh-liang, the young marshal of Manchuria (an erratic opportunist who sometimes cooperated with the Communists), from a Japanese. It was not until 1931 that it was released by the China Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations and published in the Shanghai newspaper. ("Japanese Imperialism Exposed: The Secret Tanaka Document.")

In his article Trotsky revealed that the plan was first to release the "document" abroad and then publish it in the magazine "Communist International." Shortly after the Shanghai newspaper published the forgery, it was republished in the December 30, 1931, issue of the Communist International, the official Comintern weekly.

In 1932, when the Comintern ordered the American branch of the front organization Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat to publish the "Tanaka Memorial" in a Japanese-language edition to be smuggled to Japan, it had to be translated from English to Japanese. (Report of meeting, San Francisco Bureau of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, March 2, 1932, Comintern Archives, Fond 534, Opis 4, Delo 422.) As there was no Japanese-language version of the supposed document, it clearly was a forgery.