Veteran espionage historian Richard Deacon really seems to love the Kempei Tai, Japan’s pre-Cold War military police-based intelligence agency. His Kempei Tai: A History of the Japanese Secret Service (1983, ISBN 0-8253-0131-9) is replete with personal histories of its founders and leaders, stories of intrigue, and arcane espionage factoids. The author emphasizes intelligence-gathering as practically a Japanese mania, ending the book with a chapter on how contemporary Japanese businesses utilize intelligence to gain competitive advantage. As Deacon avers, spycraft in Japan was, and is, a noble, patriotic calling. The book describes the Black Dragon society, espionage during the Russo-Japanese war, China intrigue, and activities relating to Pearl Harbor. But perhaps the most interesting chapters deal with Japanese Naval espionage on the west coast of the U.S. prior to WWII, and the efforts to counter it. 

 What the book lacks is any criticism of the Kempei Tai’s involvement in killing civilians, P.O.W.s, and even its own naval personnel, themes that are addressed in a number of other books, Sterling and Patty Seagraves’ Gold Warriors, among them. The Seagraves’ book describes Japan wantonly looting Asian countries of gold and valuables in the years prior and during WWII and hoarding it in secret underground facilities in the Philippines. In many cases, POWs were forced to dig out the caverns, and were intentionally buried alive to keep the secret secret. The Kempei Tai had a huge hand in the story, and Deacon either chose to ignore it, or chose not to report it (in fairness, the Seagraves book was meticulously researched, and was published ten years after Deacon’s). 

With that caveat, we found Deacon’s book to be a valuable resource on details of the Kempei Tai’s origin, founders, and leaders, and the chapters on U.S. west coast spying prior to WWII a necessary backdrop to anyone interested in the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII. Buy it now at the WoWasis eStore.