The Japanese Schindler? The Contested Mercy of Mamoru Shinozaki By 1942MALAYA In the pantheon of wartime heroes, his name does not belong. He was not a resistance fighter. He did not shelter a family in an attic. He was, by his own admission, an agent of the Japanese Empire—a spy who was imprisoned by the British, freed by his countrymen, and given a position of power in the occupation of Singapore. Yet thousands of people may owe their lives to him. His name was Mamoru Shinozaki (Man wearing all white uniform). And his story is one of the most morally complicated in the history of the Malayan occupation—a tale of genuine mercy delivered from within a machinery of systematic brutality, and a memoir that historians have spent decades pulling apart. The Spy Who Was Imprisoned Before the war, Shinozaki was a Japanese intelligence officer operating in British Malaya. He was good at his job. Too good. In 1940, the British arrested him and sentenced him to three years in Changi Prison for es...