Abstract
Whatever one’s thoughts about it currently, as it struggles to renew its democracy, Thailand has been most consistently prominent in modem times as a kind of arbiter of international affairs. In the 1960s, it was probably the most significant part of the South-East Asian ‘audience’ the United States was trying to impress through its opposition to communism in Vietnam.1 In the 1890s, it was already the object of Japanese pan-Asianist initiatives designed to halt the spread of Western empire in Asia. And between 1941 and 1945, its loyalty was being competed for by the United States and Japan as the one never-colonised state in South-East Asia, and therefore the nearest to being the true, authentic and representative voice of the region.2
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Notes
Joseph Frankel introduction to N. Sheahan (ed.), New York Times Pentagon Papers (New York, 1973) p. 647.
See Nigel Brailey, Thailand and the Fall of Singapore: A Frustrated Asian Revolution (Boulder and London, 1986) pp. 101–2;
Gary Hess, The United States Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, 1940–1950 ( Columbia, NY, 1987 ).
Direk Jayanama, Siam and World War II trans. Jane Keyes (Bangkok, 1978) pp. 113.A fuller version appears in W.L. Swan, ‘Japanese Economic Relations withSiam, Aspects of their Historical Development 1884–1942,’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1986) appendix, pp. 247–8.
Iida Junzo, ‘Japan’s Relations with Independent Siam up to 1933: Prelude to Pan-Asian Solidarity’, PhD thesis (University of Bristol, 1991 ) pp. 4–8, 247–9.
See especially H. Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea 1873–1910 (Philadelphia, 1960 );
and Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure (London, 1975).
Cf. also Key Hiukkim, The Last Phase of the East Asian World Order…1860–1882 (California, 1980).
The demands were for a set of concessions first offered to Japan by Dr Sun Yat-sen in the hope of enlisting support against the Western-backed President Ytian Shih-k’ai. See E.P. Young, ‘Chinese Leaders and Japanese Aid in the Early Republic’, pp. 124–39 in Akira Iriye (ed.), The Chinese and the Japanese (New Jersey, 1980). American hostility derived particularly after 1905 from Japanese exclusion of Western economic interests from Manchuria, widely viewed as a kind of new Eldorado.
The significance of Japan’s isolation for its 1930s policy-making is widely attested to. See especially G.R. Storry, Japan and the Decline of the West in Asia, 1894–1943 (London, 1979)
and Akira Iriye, The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (London, 1987).
See for example, E.T. Flood, ‘Japan’s Relations with Thailand, 1928–41’, PhD thesis (University of Washington, 1967 );
W.L. Swan, ‘Japanese Economic Relations with Siam and his Thai-Japanese Relations at the Start of the Pacific War’. Journal of South-East Asian Studies XVII: 2 (Sept 1987), pp. 270–93;
E.B. Reynolds, ‘Ambivalent Allies: Japan and Thailand 1941–1945’, PhD thesis (University of Hawaii, 1988)
and Iida Junzo, ‘Japan’s Relations with Independent Siam’. See also Chai-wat Kamchoo and Reynolds (eds), Thai-Japanese Relations in Historical Perspective (Bangkok, 1988 ).
Here and elsewhere, Reynolds has been the author of a whole series of articles and essays stemming from his PhD thesis, most recently his ‘Imperial Japan’s Cultural Program in Thailand,’ in G.K. Goodman (ed.), Japanese Cultural Policies in Southeast Asia during World War 2 (London, 1991 ), pp. 93–116.
For the context to this, see especially G.L. Gong, The ‘Standard of Civilization’ in International Society (London, 1984 ).
See the Taiheiyō SensōBibBook; e no Michi series, trans. and edited by J. Morley et al. as Japan’s Road to the Pacific War, esp. vol. 3,. The China Quagmire (New York, 1983 ).
G.M. Wilson, Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883–1937 ( Cambridge, Mass., 1969 ).
See for example M.B. Jansen, The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen (Cambridge, Mass., 1954)
and Miyazaki Toten, My Thirty-Three Years Dream, trans. Eto Shinkichi and M.B. Jansen (Princeton, 1982 ).
See especially G.W. Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca, NY, 1957), for the continuity of Thai attitudes.
B.A. Batson, The End of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam (Singapore, 1984), p. 304.
Ibid., p. 87. For a good example of contemporary anti-Japanese innuendo and propaganda, see E. Robertson, The Japanese File (Singapore, 1979 ).
Cf. Tsuji Masanobu, Singapore: The Japanese Version (London, 1984)
and also Fujiwara Iwaichi, F. Kikan: Japanese Army Intelligence Operations in Southeast Asia during World War II trans. Akashi Yoji (Hong Kong, 1983), esp. p. 299.
Oka Yoshitake, Konoe Fumimaro: A Political Biography (Tokyo, 1972, trans. 1983), pp. 99–100.
Sir A. Gilchrist, ‘Diplomacy and Disaster: Thailand and the British Empire in 1941’, Asian Affairs XIII (October 1982), pp. 249–64. See also A. Stewart, The Underrated Enemy (London, 1987 ).
Iida, ‘Japan’s Relations with Independent Siam’, also reproduced as ‘King Wachirawut, Thai Nationalism and Taisho Japan’, in I. Nish (ed.), Japan-Thailand Relations (LSE ST/ICERD Discussion Paper 228 ), 1991.
See Louis Allen, The Longest War (London, 1984), esp. pp. 557–68, which places much emphasis on Burmese nationalist hero Aung San’s initial total devotion to the Japanese, and by contrast, the unwillingness of the originally more cautious Dr Ba Maw to ever disavow them.
G. Best, ‘The French Revolution and Human Rights’ in Best (ed.), The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789–1989 (London, 1989), pp. 106–7. Conor Cruise O’Brien in his ’Nationalism and the French Revolution’, ibid., pp. 7–48, also dwells very interestingly on the French ambivalence over republiques-soeurs and non-French patriotes as opposed to France’s own expansionist frontieres naturelles claims, based on J. Godechot, La Grande Nation: I ’expansion revolutionnaire de la France dans le monde, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1956).
W.H. Elsbree, Japan’s Role in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements (New York, 1953).
See also H. Grimai, Decolonization: the British, French, Dutch and Belgian Empires 1919–1963 (London, 1978; original Paris edn, 1965).
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Brailey, N. (1994). Thailand, Japanese Pan-Asianism and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In: Dockrill, S. (eds) From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23129-4_8
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