Blood On the Sun

A dedicated American reporter in 1930’s Japan, is determined to expose that government’s plan for world domination. Blood on the Sun is a 1945 American spy thriller film directed by Frank Lloyd and starring James Cagney, Sylvia Sidney and Porter Hall. The screenwriter was Lester Cole who joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) and incorporated left-leaning political commentary in many of his scripts. He was one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten,” a group of screenwriters and directors who were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted for their refusal to testify regarding their involvement with the Communist Party.

(Much of the information sited or referenced is from online sources such as the listed books, articles, Amazon and Wikipedia)

The film is based on a fictional history behind the Tanaka Memorial document. 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 a strategy to take over the world for Emperor Hirohito. The authenticity of the document was long accepted and it is still quoted in some Chinese textbooks, but historian John Dower states 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.

The Tanaka Memorial was depicted extensively by United States wartime propaganda as a sort of Japanese counterpart to Mein Kampf. The installments above of The Battle of China and Prelude to War of Frank Capra’s Academy Award-winning movie series Why We Fight describe the Tanaka Memorial as the document that was the Japanese plan for war with the United States. The Tanaka Memorial was depicted the same way in Know Your Enemy: Japan, also directed by Capra during the war. As presented in these movies, the five sequential steps to achieve Japan’s goal of conquests are:

Conquest of Manchuria
Conquest of China
Conquest of the Soviet Union or Siberia
Establishment of bases in the Pacific
Conquest of the United States

Its authenticity is not accepted by scholars today, but the Tanaka Memorial was widely accepted as authentic in the 1930s and 1940s because Japan’s actions appeared to correspond with these plans. The authenticity seemed to be confirmed by the 1931 Mukden Incident, 1937 Second Sino-Japanese War, 1939 Battles of Khalkhin Gol, 1940 Japanese invasion of French Indochina, the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and the subsequent Pacific War. Historian Barak Kushner states:

There were several critical historical mistakes in the Tanaka Memorial that clearly demonstrate it a fake, but the fact that the message overlapped with Japan’s general aims to militarily subdue China coincided with the belief elsewhere that the Memorial was genuine.

In 1940, Leon Trotsky published an account of how the document allegedly came to light. Soviet intelligence had obtained it from a high-placed mole in Tokyo but did not want to compromise their own security by publishing it openly, so they had leaked it through contacts that they had in the United States.

Journalist and popular historian Edwin P. Hoyt wrote that the Tanaka Memorial was an accurate representation “of what Prime Minister Tanaka had said and what the supernationalists had been saying for months.” Iris Chang adds that the Japanese government at that time was so faction-ridden that it would have been impossible to carry out such a plan in any case. Historian Meirion Harries wrote that the Tanaka Memorial “was one of the most successful ‘dirty tricks’ of the twentieth century – a bogus document so brilliantly conceived that thirty years later Westerners were still taken in by it”. Likewise, historian William G. Beasley states that “the nature of this document, as published variously in English and Chinese, does not carry conviction as to its authenticity”. Dr. Haruo Tohmatsu, Professor of Diplomacy and War History of International Relations at the National Defense Academy of Japan, states that “The ‘Tanaka Memorial’ never existed, but the Dalian conference of that year adopted resolutions that reflected these ideas.”

In the summer of 1927 (June 27 – July 7, Tanaka convened a “Far East Conference” with members of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Army Ministry, Navy Ministry, and Finance Ministry. However, instead of ending with the production of a master plan for world domination, the Conference ended with a rough consensus that Japan should support the Kuomintang government of China in its war against the Chinese Communists, as long as the Japanese could convince General Zhang Zuolin to consolidate his base into a virtually autonomous Manchuria, which would serve as a buffer state, and eventually would fall under Japanese domination. It is alleged that the Tanaka Memorial is a secret report of this Conference.

When the Allies searched for incriminating documents to support war crime charges following the surrender of Japan, no drafts or copies of anything which corresponded to the Tanaka Memorial appeared among them; a Japanese language “original” has never been produced despite extensive research efforts.

The origin of the Memorial is still in question. Because the initial edition of the Memorial was written in Chinese, some Japanese historians have attributed it to Chinese sources, probably either Chinese Nationalists or Chinese Communists.

According to some claims, the document was forged by the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union forged the document in an attempt to trigger a war between China and Japan, a war which the Soviet Union would exploit in the service of its interests. The two theories are not mutually exclusive, as the Chinese Communist Party was a member of the Comintern under control of the Soviet Union, and Soviet policy from the 1930s was to wage a propaganda war against Japanese expansionism. Also, the first translation of the Memorial into English was done by the Communist Party USA and published in the December 1931 issue of Communist International magazine. It was later re-printed in book format.

In 1939, Peter Fleming claimed that he had produced an “update” to the Tanaka Memorial, by writing an imaginary report about a secret Allied strategy conference which was attended by the Kuomintang’s leader Chiang Kai-shek, and leaking it to the Japanese. This event proves that the British knew that the Tanaka Memorial was a forgery prior to World War II.

While the Tanaka Memorial is frequently treated as if it is a real document in newspapers and school textbooks which are published in China, most western historians have reached a consensus that the document is a forgery.

Japan’s Dream of World Empire – The Tanaka Memorial
https://dn790003.ca.archive.org/0/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.60766/2015.60766.Japan-S-Dream-Of-World-Empire-The-Tanaka-Memorial.pdf

Communism at Pearl Harbor

HOW THE COMMUNISTS HELPED TO BRING ON
PEARL HARBOR AND OPEN UP ASIA
TO COMMUNIZATION
By Anthony Kubek, University of Dallas

https://campconstitution.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Communism-At-Pearl-Harbor.pdf

Anthony Kubek, How the Far East Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941-1949, Henry Regnery Company, 1963. Professor Kubek’s comprehensive, incisive analysis of the American foreign policy debacle in Asia is a modern classic. Although written in 1963 at the height of the Cold War, it has an unsettling relevance to the stultifying quagmire we find our nation bogged down in today in the Middle East. I have an autographed copy of this powerful book.

https://dn720001.ca.archive.org/0/items/dr.-anthony-kubek-how-the-far-east-was-lost-american-policy-and-the-creation-of-/Dr.%20Anthony%20Kubek%20-%20How%20the%20Far%20East%20Was%20Lost_%20American%20Policy%20and%20the%20Creation%20of%20Communist%20China%2C%201941-1949.pdf

Dr. Kubek keenly observes:

“Recent decades have been characterized by retreat from the liberal ideal of the freedom of man. Retreat to the debilitating habit of the ages – magnification of the State and a consequent shrinking of man – has been all too evident. This reactionary reversal of the most promising social and political endeavor in history has characterized itself by the customary devices of oppression: private affairs of citizens encompassed by mounting taxes, controls, and interference; military conscription; perpetual involvement in foreign interventionism and war. Precisely such conditions impelled a hardy people of European stock to settle the New World and to establish therein a government denied the powers to reinstitute the baneful practices from which these people had fled.

“The doctrines of ‘collective security’ and ‘indivisible peace’ are those of Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov. These entangling doctrines are antithetical to the ideas of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Monroe, which permitted flexibility in the matter of national conduct and enabled the dictate of peaceableness, honor, and principled reason to be followed. Committed to a libertarian and pacific course, America’s conduct among the nations of the world could, consistent with her liberal ideal, command unsought respect and influence. Conversely, today’s hollow preachments, belied by our practice, garner the type of respect and influence customarily enjoyed by a wealthy hypocrite.” (Kubek, pages 439-440)

Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor, by John Koster
https://books.google.com/books?id=6YLeQMnN2bYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Americans have long debated the cause of the December 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many have argued that the attack was a brilliant Japanese military coup, or a failure of U.S. intelligence agencies, or even a conspiracy of the Roosevelt administration. But despite the attention historians have paid to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the truth about that fateful day has remained a mystery until now. In Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor, author John Koster uses recently declassified evidence and never-before-translated documents to tell the real story of the day that FDR memorably declared would live in infamy, forever. Operation Snow shows how Joseph Stalin and the KGB used a vast network of double-agents and communist sympathizers most notably, Harry Dexter White to lead Japan into war against the United States, demonstrating incontestable Soviet involvement behind the bombing of Pearl Harbor. A thrilling tale of espionage, mystery and war, Operation Snow will forever change the way we think about Pearl Harbor and World War II.

The Best of Charles Burris