Kenpeitai

Let's move forward to the FAQ.

So in the FAQs, can the Kempeitai officer issue the Banzai charge order? Yes, they can.

And including to other officers.

The next question is, can the Banzai charge order to other platoon commanders and company commanders? Yes.

Everyone caught with the Philippine money and the U.S. dollar will be brought to Fort Santiago soon.

and tortured by the Kempeitai.

So we had to start using Japanese money.

But the people said, people in the market said, how come if this is real money, how come they have to point a gun at us for us to accept their money, right? And so these are the ordinary folks thinking this.

This is Sumida pictured towards the end of the war at an undisclosed location.

He was, and can I have a show of hands again, who's heard of the Kempeitai? Yes, so the Kempai Tai, for those of you who don't know, was a military police unit.

It's no coincidence, their responsibilities were essentially to police all of the occupied territories of Southeast Asia and Asia, all of the occupied territories.

And it's no coincidence that so many of the atrocities The word Kempeitai keeps on coming up because they ruled those areas, or they controlled those areas, I should say, through a policy and a campaign of terror and fear, through illegal incarceration, torture, execution, and these sorts of methods.

And this man was a very senior officer in the Kempeitai, and he was a man that had a reputation for getting results.

Don't let this smile fool you.

He always had a smile.

And in their desperation to survive, they had to steal and resort to these tactics to be able to put food on the table for their families.

This hostility against immigrants was in large part due to Korean dissidents, who had been undertaking terrorist attacks across the country.

In response, the Japanese government enacted security measures, including an increase in the country's internal security forces, the most notable and infamous of which was the Kenpei Tai.

who were the military police arm of the army, but who also acted as the secret police within Japan itself, as well as its occupied territories.

In 1926, the Japanese Emperor Yoshihito, the son of Emperor Meiji, died and was replaced by his young and timid son, the 124th Emperor Hirohito, who would largely, due to his inexperience, come increasingly under the influence of the now powerful militarists within the Japanese government, particularly factions within the army and navy, through the country's minister of war, who was only accountable to the emperor himself and had held a veto over all policy decisions within Japan since the turn of the century.

Imperial delegates stormed out of the League of Nations, effectively meaning that any prospect of peace between Japan and China had now been lost and, as a consequence, the Land of the Rising Sun was now more isolated and aggrieved than ever.

In 1935, Tojo was posted to Manchuria as the commander of the now Japanese province's Kenpei-Tai secret police force, during which time he earned the nickname the Razor because of his proactive, decisive and fastidious manner of command, and it was perhaps due to him being appointed to this post that Tojo would later expand the remit of the military police after his ascension to power, resulting in the organization becoming one of the most hated and feared instruments of state repression throughout Japan and its overseas colonies.

As well as this, it is likely that Tojo's insistence in commanding the Kenpei Tai in Manchuria in a by-the-book fashion, in which he always adhered to the orders of those above him, that earned Tojo the admiration and praise of his superiors in Tokyo, that would over the coming years ensure he was given a steady stream of promotions, as the power and influence of the Japanese military increased yet further and the country plunged deeper and deeper towards war across Asia.

Since the country's annexation of Manchuria, after which a puppet state had been set up, named Manchukuo, under the rule of the deposed last emperor of China, Pu Yi, the Japanese army extended its control over an ever-increasing expanse of northern China.

Yep.

Yeah, these guys were affiliated with, they were the Kempeitai, they were the secret police and whatnot that were affiliated with 731.

And yep, it's all the same group.

They were responsible for most of that kind of thing.

We're going to isolate ourselves to World War II.

Everybody has heard of the Kempeitai.

The Kempeitai were the Japanese secret police, but the Japanese secret police also had a special duties section, Tokumu Han, while the Kempeitai were the ruthless military police arm.

responsible for public order and political enforcement.

Each main Kempeitai detachment, what was called a Bukentai, featured a dedicated special duty section.

These units...

They worked hand-in-hand with General Masao Baba's Counterintelligence Command in Manila.

And I think that there was an over 25% death rate in the death camp that they placed them in for the remainder of the war.

Those supplies included a few thousand FP-45 Liberator pistols, which kept the Japanese and their collaborators living in constant fear of the seemingly harmless civilians.

The Kempeitai never knew when their next arrest would end with a .45 slug and nice letter to their families.

There were possibly up to 250,000 or more USAFFE-affiliated guerrilla fighters, not counting the actively helpful sympathizers.

Another significant resistance force was the hook Bala hop, or the hook, which they started forming even as the American and Filipino service members for fighting the Battle of Bataan.

There was a whole trove of documents captured on Leyde in early 45, I believe.

It was all Kempeitai records that showed evidence.

the Japanese had a firm grasp, in Cebu particularly, of who the battalion commanders were.

In some cases, down on the company level, they knew every leader in the movement.