Talk:Kenji Doihara

Number of emigre women forced into prostitution

We have two sources, it seems: Bisher who says "several" thousands and Seth who supposedly says 100,000. Why supposedly? Because I haven't been able to see his book on Google Books - so I cannot be sure it's even quoted correctly. I had changed the 100,000 to several, giving preference to Bisher, since he appears to be a more credible source (Seth looks like a colourful figure, but his scholarly credentials are rather weak). Now, 94.71.19.40 edited this to "tens of thousands" which I had to revert, as such a "compromise" is very much WP:SYNTH - to be avoided like the plague.

Another reason why I strongly doubt the 100,000 figure is that the Comfort Women article doesn't even mention Russians - while there are widely varying estimates of how many women were forced into prostitution by the Japanese military - from 20,000 to 400,000, all authorities seem to be largely in agreement over the ethnic composition of this luckless group: "Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Taiwanese, Burmese, Indonesian, Dutch and Australian women". Russians must have formed a marginal part - maybe to the tune of several thousands but surely not 100,000. Bazuz (talk) 23:41, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Edits by User 94.71.22.147

User 94.71.22.147 is responsible for what appear to be questionable edits to this article in 2012.

This section is particularly suspect:

The Eleven Reliable clique was an external tool of a more closed group of three influential senior military officers called the "Three Crows" (Tetsuzan Nagata, Toshiro Obata and Yasuji Okamura) who wanted to modernize the Japanese military and to purge it of its anachronistic samurai tradition and the dominant allied clans of Chōshū and Satsuma that favored that tradition. The real sponsor behind both two bodies was Field Marshal Royal Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, uncle and advisor of the Emperor Hirohito, and responsible for eight fake coups d'état, four assassinations, two religious hoaxes, and countless threats of murder and blackmails between 1930 and 1936 in his effort to neutralize the Japanese moderates, that opposed war, by spreading terror. Higashikuni highly favored covered work by faithful officers inside the intelligence departments in order to bring about the political program of his own clique named "Toseiha". This clique had a decisive materialistic, westernizing approach on the issue of the Empire's expansion, in a rather colonization-like fashion, as opposed to the rival "Kodoha" clique which was for a more "spiritual" way of expansion as an effort to liberate and unite all yellow race peoples under a racial, not nationalistic Empire. Kōdōha, headed by Gen. Sadao Araki, under the national socialistic, totalitarian and populistic philosophical influence of Ikki Kita charged Toseiha for collusion with the Zaibatsu financially conglomerate business clique, or simply put it, for amoralism and pro-capitalism.

1. The assertion that Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni was "responsible for eight fake coups d'état, four assassinations, two religious hoaxes, and countless threats of murder and blackmails between 1930 and 1936" is not mentioned anywhere in the article on Naruhiko_Higashikuni itself.

2. The characterisation of the Kodoha clique as being "for a more 'spiritual' way of expansion as an effort to liberate and unite all yellow race peoples under a racial, not nationalistic Empire" smacks very much of propagandism for the Kodoha and is not echoed at other Wikipedia articles.

I do not have a brief for any of these people, including the Kodoha or Toseiha, but the very strange tone of the article does prompt me to wonder how well-grounded some of these claims are.

User 94.71.22.147 has also made other edits to the article which seem a little unusual. For example, this

Robbery, rape, assault and murder by soldiers and gendarmes controlling Manchuria's Chinese and Russian population, and arbitrary confiscation of property and unabashed extortion became commonplace.

was turned into

After the occupation of Manchuria, under his supervision the Japanese secret service soon turned Machukuo into a vast criminal enterprise where rape, child molestation, sexual humiliation, sadism, assault and murder became institutionalized means of terrorizing and controlling Manchuria's Chinese and Russian population.

This

He became the mastermind of the Manchurian drug trade, and sponsor to a wide variety of underworld activities in China intended to finance Japanese intelligence operations and to undermine Chinese military stability.

was turned into

He became the mastermind of the Manchurian drug trade, and the real boss and sponsor behind every kind of gangs and underworld activities in China..

Now it seems that he was a particularly nasty fellow, but the edits seem rather sensationalist, especially the accusation that he was 'the real boss and sponsor behind every kind of gangs and underworld activities in China'.

Does anyone have any idea on the accuracy of these edits?

123.122.199.1 (talk) 01:24, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

I'd say that, unless 94.71.22.147 provided new cites to support these changes, they ought to be reverted. --Yaush (talk) 01:43, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Agreed --MChew (talk) 01:53, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Anti-Japanese sentiment

He was a professional soldier, this article contains IMTFE hatred. Many other Japanese were called savage criminals then. User:NipponSun7 — Preceding undated comment added 11:47, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

This sounds like a distinctly unconvincing reason to include the systemic bias header to me.Zmflavius (talk) 16:34, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

Removed tag. Whatever notional anti-Japanese sentiment there might be found related to the topic, it has not harmed the accuracy or balance of the biography. Binksternet (talk) 23:51, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

Too Many Errors

Doihara longed for a high-ranking military career, but his family's low social status stood in the way. He therefore contrived to use his 15-year-old sister as a concubine for a prince, who in exchange, rewarded him with a military rank and a posting to the Japanese embassy in Beijing, China as assistant to the military attaché General Hideki Tōjō

These claims are just ridiculous. His "social status" was low (so Japan was still under the Edo Shogunate?) so he sent his sister as concubine for a "prince" (I wonder who it might be!) to get a promotion, to work in the Beijing Embassy (which he absolutely did not) under "Tojo" (who graduated the Army War College 3 years after him!).

Doihara's performance was recognized, and by 1930 he was assigned to the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office.

Yes, he was assigned to the General Staff Office, but by 1913.

There, together with Hideki Tojo, Itagaki Seishirō, Daisaku Komoto, Yoshio Kudo, Masakasu Matsumara and others, he became a chosen member of the "Eleven Reliable" circle of officers. The Eleven Reliable clique was an external tool of a more closed group of three influential senior military officers called the "Three Crows" (Tetsuzan Nagata, Toshiro Obata and Yasuji Okamura) who wanted to modernize the Japanese military and to purge it of its anachronistic samurai tradition and the dominant allied clans of Chōshū and Satsuma that favored that tradition.

What is this "Eleven Reliable" or "Three Crows" crap, I mean, really. Googling these terms brings up nothing but this page. In Japanese it literally yields nothing.

The latter half about modernizing the "anachronistic samurai tradition" stuff is just anachronistic in itself. The Satsuma clique in the Navy was purged even before the 1st Sino-Japanese war started. The Choshu clique in the Army were pretty much dead or retired by the Showa era.

The ritual suicide of Gensui Baron Mutō Nobuyoshi, who allegedly had left a note to the Emperor Hirohito pleading for mercy for the people of Manchuria, was in vain.[10]

This suicide thing is in the guy's article too, but I am pretty convinced that it is untrue. The Japanese Wikipedia page tells nothing of a "suicide" nor a "note to the Emperor"; it just says he died of diesease. Japanese literature doesn't say anything either and not even a conspiracy theory appears in a quick Google search.

I didn't even bother to fully check the passages about his conspiracies and atrocities and whatnot. Yes, Doihara did some spooky conspiracy stuff (as stated in the Japanese page), he might have sold opium and killed some folks, but I don't see how he "vastly exceeded the normal behaviour of an intelligence officer," at least from information in Japanese sources.

From these atrocious errors I can just see that the people editing this article (and perhaps, the authors of the sources) has no idea about this person or modern Japanese history at all. I've always known that the English Wikipedia does poor at Japanese topics, perhaps due to poor English literature and editors with ideological motivation without expertise, but this article is probably the worst I've seen so far.97.91.189.117 (talk) 06:32, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

No attempt made at objectivity

I'm more or less used to every Wikipedia article on figures from Imperial Japan being a list of every bad thing they ever did, instead of neutral or useful biographies, but this is just preposterous.

Let's just skip past the judgment made that a sarcastic comment made by a no-name historian, to the effect that Doihara was an oppressor and not a liberator, deserves to be in the opening paragraph. This article then goes on literally to cite a work of fiction for the claim that Doihara was a poor officer and a drug addict. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.189.72.94 (talk) 10:48, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Then correct it. 104.169.37.99 (talk) 00:52, 12 November 2022 (UTC)