Good or bad, it's necessary for the nation.
Nothing on God's green Earth can justify an organization like the Kempeitai OR their methods.
Tojo Hideki was head of the Kempeitai in Manchuria from 1935 to 1937, where he made his reputation by effectively transforming the Kempeitai into the arm of a police state. The extent to which the Kempeitai thereafter became a law unto itself, rather than ruthlessly executing the policies of the Japanese Army leadership, remains unclear.
The civilian counterpart to the Kempeitai was the Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu (Tokko in short) or Special Police, known popularly as the "Thought Police." Though the Kempeitai were better known to Westerners, due to their jurisdiction over prisoners of war and civilian internees, the Tokko more closely resembled the Gestapo and other secret police organizations. However, by 1941, Japan had become a military dictatorship, and the Kempeitai often asserted jurisdiction even in Japan itself, on the grounds that they were responsible for enforcement of conscription laws and counterespionage. As a result, they sometimes clashed with the Tokko. The Navy had its own military police in areas under its control, the Tokkeitai, which was created in part to protect Navy personnel from the excesses of the Kempeitai but was equally brutal towards conquered peoples.
The Kempeitai had a relationship with the Japanese criminal underworld, sometimes using gang members as informants. This reflected the older samurai practice of hiring gangsters to terrorize peasants.
The organization and methods of the Kempeitai resembled those of other historical secret police organizations. A Kempei was empowered to arrest personnel of rank up to three grades greater than his own. In wartime Japan, there was no concept of habeas corpus and the Kempeitai could arrest whoever they liked and hold them for as long as they pleased. There was also no presumption of innocence under Japanese law; the burden lay on the one charged with a crime to prove his innocence, rather than on the Kempeitai to prove his guilt. The Kempeitai held their own trials (gunritsu kaigi, "martial law proceedings") at which the defendant had no right to mount a defense and was sometimes not even told the nature of the charges against him. There was no explicit legal authority for these trials, which differed from the regular courts-martial (gunpo kaigi) prescribed by Army regulations.
The Kempeitai made frequent use of torture. The methods most commonly reported included suspending a suspect by his wrists in a way that partially dislocated his shoulders or forcing a suspect to kneel and putting a heavy timber on his calves on which the interrogators stood, partially dislocating the victim's ankles. Other forms of torture included water torture, burning, and electric shock. Beatings were frequent. Kempei were encouraged to be creative in developing new methods of torture. A Kempeitai handbook on torture stated (Hoyt 1993):
Methods of procedure
(a) Torture
This includes kicking, beating, and anything connected with physical suffering. This method is only to be used when everything else has failed as it is the most clumsy. Change the interrogating officer after using torture and good results can be obtained if the new officer questions in a sympathetic manner.
(b) Threats
(1) Hints of future physical discomforts, for example: torture, murder, starvation, solitary confinement, deprivation of sleep.
(2) Hints of future mental discomforts, for example: not to be allowed to send letters, not to be given the same treatment as others and (for prisoners of war) to be kept back last in the event of an exchange of prisoners.
Australian lieutenant Rod Wells described his treatment by the Kempeitai at Sandakan (AWM 2010):
The interviewer produced a small piece of wood like a meat skewer, pushed that into my left ear, and tapped it in with a small hammer. I think I fainted some time after it went through the drum. I remember the last excruciating sort of pain, and I must have gone out for some time because I was revived with a bucket of water. Eventually it healed but of course I couldn't hear with it. I have never been able to hear since.
The Kempeitai sometimes planted evidence of crimes against suspects. A British civil engineer was held for over three weeks in a wooden cage measuring 10' by 20' that held up to 42 other prisoners. Interrogations were frequent and food was limited to an inadequate quantity of boiled rice. However, he was relatively fortunate; although he could hear the screams of other prisoners being tortured, and many of the Chinese prisoners kept with him were dreadfully ill, he was eventually repatriated.
During the occupation of Singapore, the Kempeitai erected iron stakes outside the YMCA and Cathay Building, on which they periodically impaled the severed heads of persons executed for anti-Japanese activity.
How can you say this was NECESSARY?