Customer Reviews

Kempeitai: Japan's Dreaded Military Police

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This could have been a brilliant book - the subject certainly has spectacular prospects - but it was not to be. Fifty years on there are few survivors of the legions of the Kempeitai, and even fewer survivors of their victims. It could have been a timely piece of scholarship. Instead we are treated a poor collection of anecdotes which lack suffcient breadth and analysis to be evidence of anything other than the incidents they describe, not the Kempeitai as a whole, nor their operations. More disappointing is the author's unconcealed antipathy towards his subject, as a result of his father's wartime experiences. If you need a book on the subject then consider buying it, but otherwise look elsewhere.

Japan's military police were as evil as the more well known german geatapo. The daily lives of the military police and their prisoners is glossed over. More detail is put into the administration and organization of the military police. The book is very dry reading and not much of a story. Time moves quickly in this book, with not many pages devoted to any one area or incident, but with only 168 pages i suppose that is to be expected. An interesting title, reduced to very boring reading, i am disappointed.

For reasons that are very difficult to understand, when the subject of war crimes in World War II comes up, it almost always involves the actions of the Germans. Even though the Japanese were just as brutal to the population of the areas they occupied and even more brutal to enemy POW's, it is a subject that is rarely discussed. In Japan, formal acknowledgements of the war crime actions of the Japanese during the war are rare and tepid.
The Kempeitai were the Japanese version of the German Gestapo, feared by all, including their fellow Japanese. While it is impossible to thoroughly chronicle their actions in only 167 pages, Lamont-Brown gives a good overview of the role the Kempeitai played in the war. They routinely executed civilians and captured allied personnel and on occasion even ate their flesh. Japanese medical personnel carried out horrific medical experiments on humans and were later granted immunity by General MacArthur in exchange for the records of their experiments.
This book is an example of one that should be read by more people. It is sad and unfortunate that more people do not know and appreciate the actions of the Japanese during the Second World War. Those who suffered through it remember it well, but shortly they will be gone and it is up to historians to keep the memories of their suffering alive.

I'm all in favor of books like this. As time goes on and memories fade, more and more Americans have come to regard the Japanese as victims of World War II. Sure, they bombed Pearl Harbor, but was that any reason we should have dropped an atomic bomb on them?

In fact, Imperial Japan and especially the Imperial Japanese Army (it's worthwhile to distinguish between the two) ran a killing and torture machine that in many respects was the equal of Hitler's Germany. The Kempeitai did much of this work. Officially, it was only the army's police force, but it was feared by Japanese civilians, by the captive populations of Asia, and especially by prisoners of war.

Unfortunately, Lamont-Brown is a professional writer of books, with 50-odd to his credit in a bit more than 30 years--a British Martin Caidin, if you like. Nobody can turn out books at that rate and spend the necessary time in research. As a result, this is mostly a collection of anecdotes and unrelated themes--whatever Lamont-Brown turned up, he shaped the book around that, or so it seems. So it fails both as a serious history of the Kempeitai and as an indictment of the Japanese way of making war.

But it's the only one we have, and therefore worth reading. However, if your interest lies mostly with the fate of Anglo-American prisoners of war, then a better book to start with is Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese.

The author talks more about atrocities than the counter intelligence role that the organization played. The only intelligence type stuff they discuss is the Ricard Sorge(Soviet Master Spy in Germanys Tokyo Embassy) capture and interogation. The author does catelouge the atrocities committed by this organization well though(Hence the title Japan's dreaded military police). The author explains the disgusting things that this organization did like make sex slaves out of Korean and other Western Women captured by them during the war, decapitating allied airmen, biological experiments on POW's, stuffing prisoners in Bambooe baskets and liteing them on fire. He also explains the sickining fact that many in this organization went unpunished.

The writer is a serial author, who claims to have close to 50 books published. Although the topic is very important and few writers have tackled this subject, he makes it very uninteresting. The Kempeitai killed many American POWs and experimented on bacterial agents with jailed inmakes. These are also the guys who kidnapped women in conquered countries to serve as comfort women to the Japanese armed forces.

The shortcomings of this book are many. Perhaps a few more established true stories about how and why prisoners suffered. The author tries to tell the organizational side of this terrorist organization and spends more time using the Japanese words to describe the various ranks. This could have been a good to great book.

A long-neglected topic, we have here a brief chronicle of Japan's military secret-police of World War II.

Seven decades ago, Japan, Italy, and Germany were led down the wrong path by despotic regimes who aspired to world-conquest. Working mostly independantly of one-another, the Axis powers, Japan and Germany, very nearly achieved their goal.

Governments that strive for totalitarian rule require "secret-police" forces. In Western experience, the most recent examples we are familiar with, were the Gestapo and KGB, of Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R., respectively. There is a vast plethora of books on the political/internal-security units employed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but, as usual, there is very little available about similar units of Imperial Japan.

Lamont-Brown's book is a general introduction at best, but its a good source to utilize as a pre-cursor to more specific reading on the topic.

The Kempeitai was founded in 1881. Like all secret-police units, it was tasked with espionage, counter-intelligence, and enforcement duties aimed at suppressing internal dissent and opposition to Japanese Imperial rule. In addition to establishing and managing of spy-rings, the Kempeitai conducted psychological warfare against the people of occupied nations, and enemy combatants. They ran programs on the research of biological warfare. They ran a series of military brothels in which an untold number of Asian, and even some Western women, were forcibly conscripted to service Japanese military personnel. The Kempeitai were also tasked with interrogation of prisoners, which frequently involved depraved methods of torture. Many Allied aviators were subjected to war-crimes at the hands of Kempeitai agents. The Kempeitai were also involved in collecting slave-labor from the populations of occupied nations, and Koreans seem to have been the most frequent victims.

In truth, this book should have been longer, but I am not aware of any other books available about the Kempeitai. This is a good start, at least.