The Japanese Village in Ayutthaya
Overseas Japanese in the Seventeenth Century
An introduction to the Japanese village in Ayutthaya and the nature of life in Siam.
The number of overseas Japanese living and travelling through East and Southeast Asia increased after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. Some travelled in the official Go Shuin Sen (vermillion seal ships), while others were pirates and adventurers escaping from the victors of the battle or else from the newly-enforced persecution of Christianity. This gave rise to the various Japanese communities in Namban (Southeast Asia), which had their own different classes and forms of economic activity.
Ayutthaya was the capital of Siam which had been established by King Ramathibodi (U Thong) in 1351. It was based on the Chao Phraya river and much of the official section occupied a small island in the middle of the river. Further north than Bangkok is today, the city was the first real community that a traveller would encounter rowing upstream, since most of central Siam (now Thailand, of course) was little more than marshland at this time. Ayutthaya derived its position and status from trade. Located part of the way between India and China, Ayutthaya was an important trading post for both east and west and contingents of merchants established their own villages within or just outside the city walls: Indians, Persians, Arabs, Chinese, Malays, even Europeans had their own areas and were granted limited rights to administer their areas according to their own laws and customs. The Japanese village was located west of the Portuguese and south of the Dutch villages and Japanese Christians were prominent within it – Siam has a long and distinguished tradition of religious tolerance that more or less has remained until the present day. The famous Constantin Phaulkon, who rose from being a cabin boy with the East India Company to the prime minister of Siam under King Narai the Great, was a resident of the village and, by tradition, married one of the young ladies there. His wife, Doya Mary Dae Pina was of mixed Portuguese and Japanese parentage and she went on to open a school for more than one hundred local children, offering religious and general education. The school was symbolic of the cosmopolitanism of the city of Ayutthaya. Japanese men worked as soldiers and craftsmen when they had economically valuable skills.
All of this came to an end after the treachery of General Phetraja, whose usurpation of the throne was facilitated by the seizure and execution of Phaulkon. The Japanese village persisted until the city was burnt to the ground by the invading Burmese in 1767, although Phetraja’s nationalist policies drained much of the vitality from the nation.
