On Thursday, 2 September 2021, Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM) will present Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri in a lecture performance, An Imperial Sake Cup and I.
As TU students know, Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri is former Rector of Thammasat University and an acclaimed historian, winner of the Fukuoka Academic Arts and Culture Prize in the fields of History and Politics.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes many books by Ajarn Charnvit as well as over 8500 books generously donated from his personal library and now shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
These include books formerly in the personal collection of Professor Benedict Anderson, an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian and longtime friend and colleague of Ajarn Charnvit.
The 2 September lecture performance will also include participation from Teerawat Mulvilai, coartistic director of B-Floor Theatre, and Nontawat Numbenchapol, a documentary film director and cinematographer.
Through a collector’s item, Ajarn Charnvit discusses his own personal experience, born in the 1940s, at a time when Thailand was occupied by Japanese troops.
In an increasing international trend, eminent historians have been writing autobiographies or memoirs as part of historical literature.
The TU Library owns copies of A Life Beyond Boundaries by Professor, Benedict Anderson, written at the request of Japanese colleagues.
Another book, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
Its author, Professor Jaume Aurell, a medieval historian at the University of Navarra, Spain, notes that in recent years, professional historians have produced over 450 autobiographies or memoirs:
It is possible that no other academic discipline can boast of such a high number of autobiographies written by its professionals.
Whereas historians were previously long seen more as objective recorders of facts, even if this view was never accurate, their presence is increasingly understood as part of the historical picture.
As TU students in the sciences know, in physics, the observer effect means to disturb an observed system by the act of observing it.
Scientists who use instruments to measure things may change the condition of what they are measuring by doing so. An example often cited is if we check the pressure on an automobile tire, some air is let out, which instantly changes the pressure.
Likewise, for anything to be visible, light must hit it and be reflected, which may also change the object.
If we are aware of these changes caused by the presence of the observer, we can adjust our results accordingly.
While historians are not usually so directly intrusive in their subject matter as scientists, it is nonetheless helpful to be reminded of their presence.
The choice of subjects made by historians and the way they are addressed echoes the social, political, and intellectual developments of their time.
So Ajarn Charnvit’s informal recollections have significance in terms of his later renowned books such as The Rise of Ayudhya: A History of Siam in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1976); Sangkhalok-Sukhothai-Ayutthaya and Asia (2002); Discovering Ayutthaya (2007); and Annotated bibliography on the Mekong (2008).
In the presentation, he recounts how since he was a boy, he enjoyed collecting things such as stamps, coins, pictures, books, and ceramics.
Probably the first item the collected was a small pocket knife which his father received from a Japanese soldier during the Second World War.
The second was a red-colored sake cup with a picture of a golden chrysanthemum in the center.
He was given the cup in late 1964, while working with an official team welcoming the Japanese Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko on their visit to Thailand.
At that time, Ajarn Charnvit had just finished his bachelor of arts (BA) degree at Thammasat University and had started work as an international relations officer at the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA).
On that occasion, his colleagues were assigned to welcome the Japanese Imperial couple at Phan Fa Bridge on Ratchadamnoen Avenue.
This was a ceremony for presenting the Key to the City of Bangkok.
HM King Rama IX and HM Queen Sirikit were present.
After that ceremony, each staff member received a red sake cup. In the center is the chrysanthemum logo of the Japanese imperial family.
The souvenir cup was wrapped in a thin satin cloth placed in an ordinary wooden box. On one side is handwritten in a jagged style: The Imperial Visit of Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko.
The first item from Japan which he collected was less celebratory.
When Japan lost the Second World War, certain Japanese soldiers gave his father a knife, an iron sukiyaki pan, and a bicycle.
Only the knife is still in Ajarn Charnvit’s possession.
He considers the object a form of connection to his hometown of Ban Pong, the central town of Ban Pong District in Ratchaburi Province, Thailand, covering the entire Ban Pong Subdistrict, over 75 kilometers west of Bangkok.
To paraphrase Ajarn Charnvit’s recollections,
His father, Chern Kasetsiri (formerly Choeng Kaenkaew) was born in Khlong Dan township, Samut Prakan Province. He moved to Bangkok to live with his uncle, Mr. Thong Wongthongsri, a Sino-Thai business man. After secondary schooling, he settled in Ban Pong. He ran a business there while campaigning for local elections, and became a deputy mayor for some years. He had a store trading firearms and ammunitions.
His mother studied to be a nurse midwife at Chulalongkorn Hospital in Bangkok. She moved to Ban Pong to live with Ajarn Charnvit’s father and practice in her field of study.
After its December 7, 1941 bombing of United States Naval Station Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Japan attacked Western Asian colonies. On December 8 at around 2am, Japan invaded Thailand by land, entering through French Indochina.
There was fierce resistance by the Thai military, citizens, and volunteers, including young cadets, but soon the Bangkok government ordered a ceasefire.
Japan sought to use Thailand to further its operations into British Malaya, Burma, and India. Thailand, under the leadership of Field Marshal Phibun, had to accept Japanese pressure.
Finally, one month later, the Thai government decided to join the Axis powers as an ally by declaring war on Great Britain and the United States of America on January 25, 1942.
For almost four years during wartime, Ban Pong district became a stronghold for the Japanese military.
Their camps were set up from Nong Pladuk Junction railway station to Ban Pong railway station, a distance of five kilometers.
At this important strategic site for Japan in Thailand, they started to build a railway connecting Thailand and Lower Burma.
This became notorious as the Death Railway. It has a total length of 415 kilometers, connecting Nong Pladuk Junction in Ban Pong to Thanbyuzayat, a small town south of Mawlamyine in southeastern Myanmar…
With such haste during the construction, the Japanese committed atrocities and war crimes against Asian forced laborers (rōmusha ) and Western prisoners.
Around 200,000 Asian slave laborers or rōmusha were captured from Malaya and Indonesia. Almost half of them died during the war.
Most of those forgotten Asian slave laborers were classified as Indian, probably Tamil, Punjabi, and Telugu in origin, including people from Sumatra, Indonesia, and Malaya as well as Hainanese, Cantonese, and Hokkien Chinese. No history has recovered the identity and stories of these Asians lost in the war.
In Malaysia today, when one meets people of Indian descent, almost every family had relatives who were slave laborers who were killed or disappeared during the war…
Thai men were treated as hired laborers, since Thailand was an ally of Japan in the war.
Nowadays, the Death Railway and the so-called Bridge on the River Kwai have become major tourist destinations. The film The Bridge on the River Kwai, released in 1957, has contributed to the income of the Kanchanaburi Province. Most tourists have no memory of the war or the suffering of peoples of the past. It is just a place for them to take a lot of selfies.
These and later memories associated with Japan, Japanese ceramics, and Thailand will make up this illuminating presentation of autobiography as part of history.
A comparable program featuring Ajarn Charnvit will be presented on 5 September 2021.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)