Japanese Gestapo?

So, I'm doing my Heike reading -- (Naa, Jess; the Taira are the villains. Or at least, they're evil. Or maybe we were talking about whether the Heike were villains or not? I don't even remember~ Anyway, the Heike are the Taira, so, whatever. *blink*) -- and I'm still in the first chapter where they're giving a bunch of backgrounds. Besides adoring the talk of Tadamori and his mistress for no particular reason, I can't help noticing this one part:

Taira Kiyomori brings up an army of 300 young boys, all between the ages of 14-16, in page-boy haircuts, to be his Young Nazis eyes and ears in the city. If anybody, anywhere, spoke about the Heike disfavorably, one of these boys would hear about it and gather a small mob of other boys. They would bust into the offender's host, place him under arrest, and cart him off after confiscating most of his possessions. Everybody was too terrified of these boys to talk about the Heike, or the Taira, or anything. The text says that if you saw a boy in a page-boy haircut, you took detours to avoid him; you pretended not to notice him walking past you if you're regulating entrance into the palace.

Dude. Don't fuck with Kiyomori's boys.