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Human Rights Records

The appalling human rights record of the Kempeitai (and other Imperial police forces and secret services) needs to be addressed if this article is to have a neutral POV.

That may be the case, but any such material should have references included at the time that it's inserted. At present there are some few references to torture, unfair trials and so forth, but even these are in danger of being removed because they are not supported by reference. Demiurge1000 (talk) 16:51, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
I could not believe that the terrible outrages committed by the Kempeitai were not mentioned in this article which looked like a total whitewash, subsequently I have started a section on human rights abuses with the necessary citations. Twobells (talk) 18:47, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Cleanup

Apart from grammar, the first part of the article now contradicts with second part (on experiments on people and possibly others). A knowledgeable person should resolve these - perhaps Japanese Wiki should be asked. Pavel Vozenilek 01:59, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

I've Englished the first section while trying not to change the information presented. --Cubdriver 22:17, 6 January 2006 (UTC) Later: I have treated Kempeitai as a singular noun. Would it be better plural? --Cubdriver 11:29, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

I've readded the cleanup tag, as the current article is quite engrish-filled.

Japanese Secret Services and the Axis Powers

This intelligence collaboration was maintained until early 1945, and in a greatly reduced from then until circa August 1945. The war in Europe ended on May 8-9, so the intelligence exchange would have ended by that date. Sv1xv (talk) 23:06, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm having trouble with the statement: "Until the end of conflict, Axis forces used the bases in Italian occupied Ethiopia, the Vichy France territory of Madagascar and some "officially" neutral places like the Portuguese Colonies of Goa in India." Since Ethiopia was liberated in 1941 and Madagascar seized by the British in 1942, the first two assertions seem unlikely. Yaush (talk) 18:28, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Wartime mission

In addition to the problem pointed out by Pavel above, this section contains the mission statement "Counterintelligence and counter-propaganda - run by the Tokko-Kempeitai as 'anti-ideological work'" with the word Tokko Wiki-linked to what appears to be a completely different, non-military organization. One of these two Wiki entries must be wrong. Any idea which? --Cubdriver 15:29, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Is there a contradiction? The Tokko probably thought they were working against 'subversion', just as much. By references to other pages this can be calibrated (jazz, reading foreign literature). Of course the wording on this page should be better put, but 'counter-propaganda' is pretty broad. Charles Matthews 14:24, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes, certain a contradiction! The heading says that the Kempeitai was responsible for this, and the "evidence" is that something called the Tokko-Kempeitai did the work. Are you saying that both organizations worked the field? If so, then they should be separated by "and", and perhaps "both" inserted before Tokko. I read it as saying that the Tokko were a branch of the Kempeitai. --Cubdriver 19:06, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

I've cleaned up the English (grammar and spelling) of this, and deleted the self-contradictory denial about the involvement in BW research. Guinnog

Huh?

Some from the Anglo-American world comment that "Japan and its territories did not have the writ of habeas corpus, so individuals had no rights and were presumed guilty when arrested (by military police)". However, this is wrong attribution. European civil laws have "presumption of innocent" under an inquistorial system rather than adversarial system of Anglo-American common law.

Personally I don't understand what is trying to be said here.

And what was the German equivalent alluded to of this "gendarmarie", the Gestapo? I think perhaps it's a little misplaced to compared this organization with its sweeping and arbitrary powers across society with the bourgois police of republican France. I never heard of this outfit before until I was motivated to research it after hearing it discussed in Clint Eastwood's film Letters from Iwo Jima. Tom Cod 03:45, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
The German Army in WW2 had a Gendarmerie as well, who served as military police. The Kempeitai however was like the Gestapo/SD and the Feldgendarmerie rolled into one. 207.112.57.254 (talk) 21:36, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Duplicate articles

There appear to be two articles on this same subject. One entitled 'Kempeitai' and the other entitled 'Kempeitei.' They deal with identical subject matter but have obviously been written by different contributors. These two articles should be merged under the heading 'Kempeitai.'

Tomasjpn 16:03, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Not any more. rediects in place now.--71.242.127.31 14:20, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Why is this article named Kempeitai?

It is read Kenpeitai. That's the reading on the Japanese wikipedia. -- Ishikawa Minoru 19:46, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Look at the end of this section in the MoS. "Kempeitai" is the more oft-used romanization due to historical reasons. -129.21.117.92 (talk) 00:38, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Notes on Language

I don't think it's standard to add cute little "pronounced ____" to foreign words, so there's no need for the phrase "pronounced roughly "kem-pay-tie." The article should just list the kanji.

Furthermore, there is a hideous lack of kanji. "Kempeitai jourei"? 憲兵隊条令　was too difficult to include? Also what's with using all the French terms? "Kenpeitai jourei" should translate to "Kenpei ordinance", no need to bring in these weird "Gendarmes". I'm changing these. --198.82.102.107 (talk) 06:36, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Why does "ken (憲, 'law') and hei (兵, 'soldier')" as it's written in the article become Kem and Pei when used in the word Kempeitai (憲兵隊)? Does the third character alter the reading, or is it a colloquial pronunciation that disobeys the rules? 207.112.57.254 (talk) 21:39, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
Look at the end of this section in the MoS. "Kempeitai" is the more oft-used romanization due to historical reasons.--Tomtom9041 (talk) 19:24, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Special equipment: radios

I would like to point out that "Long-range wave radio" and "Long-range wave radio" don't make sense. Either a radio device uses short or long waves, or it is a long or short range radio device - though this latter classification is very problematic to the point of absurdity. A radio device's range depends basically on its output power and wave-band in which operates. I don't want to go into radio technology here, but I would like to point out that this entry is obviously wrong. My guess is that the author meant to specify the short wave and long wave radio classes, pertaining therefore to the radio band in which they operate. 213.243.137.56 (talk) 15:58, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. Thanks! Binksternet (talk) 17:05, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

References

This article has some significant issues with references.

Some parts of the article have citations. However, most statements made in the article do not.

86.130.59.164 today removed many of the notes that citations are needed, including some that had been present for years, stating "citations/ taken from sources given in references section". However, I don't see that the references section actually supports the statements made, at least not in any manner that is clear to the reader.

If it's correct that the statements currently listed as requiring citations, are actually supported by material listed in the references section, then the implication seems to be that volume 6 of "Materials on Contemporary History, Second Series" (the first listed reference) is the work supporting these statements. However, there are currently entire sections of the article which do not cite this source, or any other.

Really the solution for this problem is for the unsourced sections to at least make some indication that the book in question is the source for the statements. It can't be left for the reader to just accept on faith that the statements are supported by *one* of the references listed at the end of the article, without making clear which. It means the support for the statements is not even verifiable.

Also, ideally, once these references are in place, they should also cite a page number or at least section of the volume in question. Citing an entire volume as a reference is not ideal.

It's very possible that some of the accounts of spy escapades, convictions etc listed in the article are in fact not supported by any of the references at all. These require further work. Demiurge1000 (talk) 19:41, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

In early September I am going to remove the controversial uncited statements if they are not cited by then. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Demiurge1000 (talk • contribs) 21:58, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

These sections just become repositories for countless appearances/mentons in films and books. However then do make any contribution to how popular culture has been influenced by the subject. In this case the Kempeitai have appeared in films mainly as the "bad guys", so basically that's it. Unless anyone can offer any more insight into the subject, i.e. a literary review of such material inclusion of popular cultures should be avoided.

'In popular culture

  • Unlike the Nazis and the Schutzstaffel ("SS"), the Kempeitai has received very little notice in Western literature and films regarding the subject. In the Clint Eastwood film, Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), one of the main characters is a former Kempei, from whom the other soldiers maintain distance, fearing that he was sent to their quarters to spy on them lest they think of desertion or mutiny. It ultimately transpires that he was shipped to fight on the frontlines during the battle of Iwo Jima after he had deliberately failed to follow an order from his commanding officer to shoot a family dog that was barking and thus "cause[d] a threat to military privacy and silence."
  • In "Human Condition I" (1959), also known as "Ningen no joken I", by director Masaki Kobayashi, in 1943 the Kempeitai furnish 600 "special laborers" to an iron ore mine in Manchuria. Two Kempeitai officials explain that these workers must be kept isolated from "ordinary workers", and instruct that "their quarters must be enclosed in barbed wire" which is electrified.
  • Tokyo Year Zero, a 2007 novel by David Peace, involves a number of characters who changed their identity post-war to hide the atrocities which they perpetrated as wartime Kempei in China.

The novel "Kampetai" by Jean-Yves Domalain describes the activities of the Kampetai during World War II in Borneo.

86.172.0.33 (talk) 13:48, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Mostly unsubstantiated

I would regard this as start class article only. Many if not most of the statements are unsubstantiated, and seem like mere rumour mongering. For example, the statement that Japanese fishermen around the world spied for the Empire (and specifically were reporting to the Kempeitai) was widely believed in the wake of the Pearl Harbour attack, but as a fact it seems highly unlikely, and in any case rests on the writer's understanding of an unsourced and un-named French writer, who, we are supposed to believe, travelled the world in the late 1930s, checking out Japanese spy networks. It's not that such a thing could not have happened; it's simply that the statement is ungrounded. It's rumour; some guy told me about this writer who did such and such. That's not a source. The list of equipment also seems a bit off, in that it simply tabulates, for the most part, regular Japanese army equipment which the Kempeitai may occasionally have used, so while it adds bulk to the article, there's little of substance there. What is needed, perhaps, is a translation of an article from the Japanese Wikipedia, if such should exist. A quick check of my local university libraries shows virtually nothing on the Kempeitai published academically in English. Theonemacduff (talk) 16:33, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Partially agree. The Kempeitai's involvement in war crimes is quite well documented from numerous sources, but its role in intelligence gathering is much murkier, and works like Deacon's and Lamont-Brown's are not up to academic standards. I have searched for, but have had a hard time finding, any good academic writings on the Kempeitai other than an annotated translation of part of a history written postwar by the Kempeitai's veteran's association -- which is remarkably candid and unapologetic about the atrocities, but says little about counterintelligence and almost nothing about intelligence work. I suspect part of the problem is overlapping responsibilities for intelligence work with other parts of the Japanese military, while another part is the quite thorough destruction of records by the Kempeitai at the time of the surrender. I agree that the list of equipment and so forth in this article is way overdone -- rather like devoting most on an article on Apollo 11 to the history of the JANAF tables on potential rocket fuels. --Yaush (talk) 16:55, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Secret police?

Kempeitai was not a secret police organisation, as stated in the article. It operated openly. Furthermore the German Schutzstaffel wasn't a secret police either!203.184.41.226 (talk) 07:39, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Le sigh. 50.111.211.140 (talk) 22:27, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

General

The few English language works on this subject are largely anecdotal and poorly sourced. A thorough understanding requires making use of material at the U.S. National Archives. This consists of translated Japanese documents and U.S. intelligence reports. While it is acknowledged that the Kempeitai as an organization carried out numerous crimes on a wide scale, the war crimes trials carried out by the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia did not target the Kempeitai as such. The trials brought to justice individuals and tried them for specific individual crimes without regard to their parent organizations or the existence of an institutional pattern of abuse. The trials did not distinguish between members of the Imperial Japanese Army in general and members of the Kempeitai. The major focus of the trials was on prisoner of war abuses. Economic crimes and crimes against civilian populations received scant attention. Please note that prisoner of war camps, both in Japan proper and the occupied areas, were operated by army units reporting to the POW administrative organization in Tokyo. The Kempeitai had access to the camps for the purpose of intelligence analysis and collection but had no role in running them.Oldbubblehead (talk) 03:24, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

A secondary, scholarly source would be needed to analyze/publish "... making use of material at the U.S. National Archives" - use of primary sources would be challenged.HammerFilmFan (talk) 03:26, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

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Correct spelling of the word...is the third letter "m" or "n"??

For the longest while, I had been informed by multiple references that the name of the IJA's military/secret police was Kempeitai...now I notice that it's been spelled with an "n" as the third letter (Kenpeitai) - but being a firm believer that the only "stupid question" is the question that is never asked, is the true spelling of the term with the now-"corrected"-to-"n", or is it really the "m" I'd seen before this time? The PIPE (talk) 13:03, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Either is acceptable, but n is consistent with Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Japan-related articles NealeFamily (talk) 23:55, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Was wondering the same thing. Because this article is about a WW2 era organisation, I assume a great deal of the sources on the subject use the M as this was the preferred spelling of the day. In fact, Kempeitai is even used several times within the article itself, as well as linking to other wiki articles that use the m spelling in their title. Considering The Man in the High Castle is broadcast right now (which uses the WW2 era spelling both in its subtitles and its on screen props), this will seem confusing if not explicitly mentioned.
Should there not at least be mention of the alternative/old spelling as a synonym (perhaps with a link to the manual of style) at the start of the article? For example something like "The Kenpeitai (憲（けん）兵（ぺい）隊（たい）, /kɛnpeɪˈtaɪ/) or Kempeitai)...", whichever is suitable. -- MiG (talk) 14:40, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Logo file

The current File:Kempeitai_logo.png file matches the armband's orientation and color, but the typeface is more than a little off if we compare this with any of the article photos (e.g. File:Kenpei.JPG, and the 1937 pic). The file shows a Mincho look, but the armbands are more of a width-constrained regular script -- like Imitation Song, but thicker. Anyways, someone should replace the font. Non-free is fine, as bitmap fonts aren't copyrightable in the US.

I don't have a lot of Japanese fonts on hand. The Chinese Kai (reg. script) fonts I have has the right glyph variation, but the stroke shape is too brush-like, and the 罒 part is often too narrow. Klee.ttc from macOS is kinda good. The two characters 憲兵 on the board in File:Military Police Memorial (守護憲兵之碑) - Yasukuni Shrine - Tokyo, Japan - DSC06105.jpg are almost perfect, but cropping from that to assemble a logo seems... a Very Weird thing to do.

Note that a different style of armband text is used in 1932: File:Entrance of prime minister's official residence after May 15 incident.jpg

--Artoria2e5 🌉 11:18, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

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