Quote:
Originally Posted by cranks
... Now I ask you. Do you even understand what kenpeitai=憲兵隊 means? It just means military police. The United States today has 憲兵隊.
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(By the way, it's tradition in English to romanize 憲兵隊 as "kempeitai", and people are more likely to find information with that spelling than with the modern "kenpeitai". The modern form emphasizes regularity over the actual pronunciation, in which the sound of ん alters from "n" to "m" before "p".)
Strictly speaking, 憲兵隊 means "law-soldier corps" (where by "corps", I mean any organized body of soldiers, rather than the specific class of army unit consisting of several tens of thousands of soldiers and commanded by a lieutenant general.)
To an American, the term "military police" implies a group of soldiers whose job it is to police
other soldiers. The powers of U.S. military police are
strictly limited, and the military is always considered to be subservient to the civilian government, except in extreme circumstances when martial law is declared.
But "law-soldier corps", when interpreted literally, can have a much broader meaning. (The same is true of "military police" if you ignore its U.S. connotation.) It simply means a body of soldiers with police functions; there is no limit on how broad those police powers may be. And in the case of the kempeitai, those powers were very broad indeed. Though it wasn't the only police force within Japan, the kempeitai still had extensive jurisdiction over the Japanese civilian population, as well as responsibility for law enforcement over occupied territories.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cranks
What is the basis for your claim that 憲兵隊 had the power of life or death over any citizen? Please present your source. Honestly you are sounding like the people who claim the US never went to the moon and they faked the video.
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Backing up claims is always good, but it's ridiculous to say that "the kempeitai had the power of life and death over any citizen" is anywhere near as extreme a claim as "the moon landings were faked". Those Westerners who have heard of the kempeitai generally also hear of its notorious reputation, which has been widely repeated. And it's important to point out that the kempeitai were disbanded after the Japanese surrender, which hardly sounds appropriate for an force of ordinary MPs. It's also interesting to note that the modern Japanese military police force is called "keimutan" (
警務官). Changing the name of an organization like that often implies that some stigma is associated with the earlier name.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cranks
Japan was not a perfect country and there were a lot of oppressions. I agree with that. But the coloreds were down right SLAVES in the states not long before WW2.
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No, they were not. Slavery had ended in 1865. The status of African-Americans before World War 2 (hell, even after the war, before the civil rights era) was surely an injustice,
but it was not slavery. No matter how tempting it may be rhetorically to call it such, doing so cheapens the meaning of the word and blurs the abomination committed by the U.S. before the Civil War and the victory achieved at its end. Although African-Americans' hard-won legal rights were greatly undermined in the South after the Civil War, and though they were still treated as an underclass even outside the South, they were not taken back into slavery. Slaves are humans treated as property, as others' work tools, with little or no legal rights of their own.