Singapore’s Oskar Schindler

They either never taught us this in his­tory lessons, or I just wasn’t pay­ing attention.

Thanks to a con­trib­u­tor on sammyboy.com, I found out that one of the heroes of the Japan­ese Occu­pa­tion in Sin­ga­pore was Japan­ese. Shi­nozaki Mamoru was a press attache with the Impe­r­ial For­eign Ser­vice and was assigned to Sin­ga­pore before the Japan­ese invaded.

He was jailed by the British for spy­ing (a charge which he denied), and was freed by the occu­py­ing Japan­ese, and given a role as a wel­fare offi­cer of the civil­ian admin­is­tra­tion of occu­pied Singapore.

Among his heroic deeds included delib­er­ate stor­age of food sup­plies in the Thom­son area so that the Lit­tle Sis­ters of The Poor would have a steady sup­ply of food; and his very lib­eral issu­ing of thou­sands of safety passes to mem­bers of the Chi­nese and Eurasian com­mu­ni­ties, an act which prob­a­bly saved thou­sands of them from being rounded up and executed.

Shi­nozaki even­tu­ally tes­ti­fied at the war crimes tri­als against his fel­low coun­try­men, and later wrote a book — Syn­onan, My Story, which is appar­ently still a source of infor­ma­tion about life in Sin­ga­pore dur­ing the Occupation.

You can read more about Shi­nozaki here.