Akira Suehiro

In December 1998,the Thai Labor Museum and Chulalongkorn University jointly organized a conference on historical studies of workers in Thailand. The two organizations also published for the first time a large volume entitled "The History of Thai Labor : Renaissance of the Workers' Prestige", which compiled fourteen academic articles totaling 569 pages. This development seems to signal an upsurge in historical studies of labor problems in Thailand. However, these studies have tended to concentrate their interest in specific aspects of the labor movement, on the basis of Marxist class analysis or on government labor policies, on the basis of a political science approach. Little attention has been paid to such important topics as labor market structure, variation in wage systems, unorthodox employment practices, and industrial relations and labor conditions of waged workers in both private firms and state enterprises. Finally, these studies, including those by Western scholars, have hardly touched on the social history of Thai waged workers or Chinese coolies before the Second World War. This paper, therefore, aims to clarify the most fundamental problems relating to Thai labor history : characteristics of labor market structure; the distorted conventional argument that overstresses the role of Chinese coolies regardless of the large number of Thai waged workers employed in state enterprises; the variety of wage systems, including hourly, daily and piece work remuneration in accordance with differences in the type of industries and jobs; differences between employment practices used for Thai workers in railway workshops and Chinese coolies in rice mills; and more universal aspects of the labor movement in pre-war Thailand which sought social justice rather than class interests. This paper proposes the way to a more fruitful study of Thai labor history by employing original documents which were compiled in the National Archive of Thailand, the British Public Record Office, and a large number of Thai-language newspaper articles during the 1920s and the 1930s. A more detailed study will follow this introductory work.

This paper examines the changes that took place in the 1950s and 1960s in Japan's perception of and policies toward Southeast Asia, and clarifies how Japan's road to economic re-entry into the region was paved. By re-examining various views about the region expressed by Japanese political leaders, bureaucrats, business officials, and renowned academics, the author seeks to demonstrate that most of the key concepts that now guide Japan's economic policies toward the region, such as economic development, a common market, and regional co-operation, were coined, and gained influence, as early as the 1950s. Following the Yoshida government's effort to enhance Japan's economic ties with South and Southeast Asian countries, the Kishi government hammered out a concrete formula for Japanese economic re-entry, based on a trinity of war reparation payments, economic development and economic co-operation. Prime Minister Kishi visited various countries in Asia in 1957, presenting his proposal for a 'Southeast Asian Development Fund' as a vehicle for promoting industrial development of the region. Although his proposal foreshadowed the initiative Japan would take in support of the 'developmentalist regimes', which would emerge later in the region in the 1960s, it failed to win the support of either the USA or the leaders of Asia. None the less, Kishi's idea was crystallized in the founding of two important government-funded organizations engaged in economic co-operation (i.e. OECF and AOTS), and a government-sponsored research institute specializing in Asian studies (IDE). At the political level, Kishi's policy was ultimately put into effect by the Satō government when it hosted the first Ministerial Meeting on Southeast Asian Development in Tokyo in 1966, which marked the beginning of both Japan's full-fledged commitment to support the USA in the Vietnam War and Japan's economic re-entry into Asian markets.