The organization also shared civilian secret police that specialized clandestine and covert operation, counterinsurgency, counterintelligence, HUMINT, interrogate suspects who may be allied soldiers, spies or resistance movement, maintain security of prisoner of war camps, raiding to capture high-value targets, and providing security at important government and military locations at risk of being sabotaged roles within Japan and its occupied territories, and was notorious for its brutality and role in suppressing dissent.

In occupied areas, it also issued travel permits, recruited labor, arrested resistance, requisitioned food and supplies, spread propaganda, and suppressed anti-Japanese sentiment.

It carried out torture, summary executions, and violent reprisals and massacres against civilians, as well as procuring comfort women and human test subjects for Unit 731.

[1] The Kempeitai was established on 4 January 1881, during the Meiji era, by order of the Great Council of State as part of a broader modernization and Westernization of the Japanese military.

The Kempeitai was instrumental in suppressing Korean opinion and political participation, and played a major role in recruiting comfort women and in conscripting guards for prisoner of war camps.

It carried out the empire's policies of suppressing Korean national identity, language, customs, and culture; it also promoted Japanese organizations and spread pro-Japan propaganda through Korea's daily newspapers.

Taiwanese and Koreans were extensively used as auxiliaries to guard POWs and police the newly occupied areas in Southeast Asia, and the Kempeitai also carried out recruitment activities among the populations of French Indochina, Malaya, and other territories.

After Tojo was appointed as Vice Minister of War in 1938 and the National Diet passed an anti-espionage act in 1939 which expanded its power, the Kempeitai became even more visible and active in Japan.

[4] From 1933 to 1941, the Soviet Union operated a spy ring in Tokyo led by Richard Sorge and Hotsumi Ozaki, which gathered intelligence on Japanese intentions in the Far East.

[citation needed] In Japan, the Kempeitai often assisted local civilian law authorities (though it was not a gendarmerie), and targeted students, farmers, socialists, communists, pacifists, foreign workers, and any showing irreverence for the emperor.

In occupied territories and war zones, the Kempeitai was responsible for issuing travel permits, recruiting labor, arresting members of resistances, requisitioning food and supplies, spreading propaganda, and suppressing anti-Japanese sentiment.

Torture methods were taught at Kempeitai schools, and included flogging, waterboarding, burning and scalding, administration of electric shocks, knee joint separation, suspension from ropes, kneeling on sharp edges, fingernail and toenail removal, and digit fracturing.

The Kempeitai pressed many POWs and civilians into slave labour gangs for war work, and subjected them to torture, including standing inside small cages set on top of red ant nests and lashing to trees with barbed wire.

[14] After the Doolittle Raid in April 1942, captured Allied airmen were accused of intentionally attacking civilians so were treated as war criminals rather than POWs, and were thus made subject to the death penalty.

[15] In December 1944, three U.S. airmen were arrested by the Kempeitai at Hangzhou; they were paraded through the streets, ridiculed, beaten, and tortured before being doused with petrol and burned alive.

[17][18] The Chinese Kempeitai was responsible for providing human test subjects, codenamed maruta ('logs'), for the Army's biological warfare research program under Unit 731 near Harbin, Manchuria.

[19] In February 1944, an outbreak of tetanus among hundreds of laborers in Java, possibly tied to the biological warfare program, was traced to contaminated vaccines.

The Kempeitai accused Achmad Muchtar of the Eykman Institute in Jakarta, who treated many of the victims, of deliberately contaminating the vaccines to sabotage labor for the Japanese, and imprisoned him for nine months before beheading him and running over his body with a steamroller.

[18] The Kempeitai also organized extensive criminal networks, which extorted vast amounts of money from businesses and civilians in areas where they operated; the forced prostitution system for the Imperial Army, whose victims were known as comfort women; and the all-female Tokyo Rose radio propaganda broadcasts.