The difficult processing of the Thai war past

Romusha in hospital barracks (Photo: Australian War Memorial)

Now almost 76 years ago, on August 15, 1945, the Second World War ended with the Japanese surrender. This past has largely remained unprocessed throughout Southeast Asia and certainly also in Thailand.

Take, for example, the tragic story of the romusha, the hundreds of thousands of Asians who were deployed to support the Japanese war effort. Despite their huge and terrible losses, the romusha struggled and still struggle to this day to find a place in their respective national collective memories as well as in global history. There are several reasons for this rather striking lack of attention. First of all, and this cannot be stressed enough, the surviving romusha could not count on a structural support to which they, like the former Western prisoners of war, could fall back after the war.

No one, but really no one felt called upon to act as their spokesperson, let alone advocate. Moreover, most of them were illiterate, so that hardly any authentic source material regarding their experiences has been preserved, let alone that their fate in their countries of origin received the same resonance in the press and publications as with the returned Allied prisoners of war. Third, there is the undeniable fact that most of the romusha during World War II were residents of the Japanese' liberated colonies.' Their agony was completely obliterated as not fitting within the historical canon in the triumphalistic post-war historiography of the young nations in Southeast Asia that had just liberated or liberated themselves from the colonial yoke.

World War II had brought much of the region's pre-war political, ethnic, and even religious tensions to a boil. Many of these conflicts had their roots or were cultivated in or under colonial rule. It should not be forgotten in this context that for many countries in Southeast Asia, Japan's surrender did not result in an end to violence or a gradual transition to political self-determination. In some cases, such as Indonesia and Burma, there was still a long and bloody road to be traveled before the colonial yoke was shaken off. With all the trauma that came with it. The merciless exploitation of the civilian population by the same Japanese with whom some of the leading figures of the anti-colonial liberation struggle had made sweet buns during the war was an uncomfortable and, above all, unwanted memory and was therefore quickly suppressed. As a result, many of Asia's war memories have been transformed beyond recognition. Or they were simply silenced or censored away. Apart from that, there is of course also the simple observation that in the immediate aftermath of the war, reconstruction, not commemoration, was the main priority of the countries involved.

It was German Chancellor Richard von Weizsacker who once said that people should know how they relate to the past in order not to be led astray in the present. A remark that, referring to the memory of World War II, might fall on deaf ears in South East Asia… If there is a culture of remembrance of the Second World War in South East Asia, it differs fundamentally from the culture of remembrance in the West. While in Asia there is hardly any attention for the victims, in the west the focus is almost entirely on the victims. Moreover, the Western culture of remembrance is characterized by a pronounced dualism that translates into what I half easily describe as the us-versus-them mentality. The Nazis and collaborators were downright madmen, followers of absolute evil. It is a way of isolating the history of Nazism and collaboration from ours. It thus leads to segregation in the collective historical consciousness: it is the history of the others, the perpetrators… not ours. By blindly following along in this very simplistic way of thinking, we naturally make it easy for ourselves, we should not ask questions or be critical and, above all, our politically correct image of good and bad will not be affected…

Romusha after liberation (Photo: Australian War Memorial)

In Southeast Asia, this dualism is almost completely absent. For many, Japan was never and never will be the devil incarnate. No matter how many victims have been made and how much misery has been caused… Many Burmese, but also Indonesians, for example, state unequivocally that the Japanese occupation has fueled and stimulated anti-colonialism. What historian would prove them wrong?

Despite the fact that Thailand did not have to grapple with this geopolitical or anti-colonial dimension, the story of the Thai-Burma railways and, by extension, the entire Second World War has taken an ambiguous place in Thai collective memory. The attitude that the Thai government – ​​led by Mussolini admirer Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram – had adopted during the war, motivated by vulgar opportunism and not entirely uncontroversial, has ensured that the Second World War occupies a very uncomfortable place in Thai historiography to this day. Thai historiography is not really known for being reliable anyway and Thai historians - with a few very rare exceptions - do not often testify to a critical attitude towards the historical canon edited by the established powers.

Unveiling Tamarkan Memorial Kanchanaburi 1944 (Photo:Australian War Memorial)

The memory of the Second World War, even cleaned up where necessary, should not be given too much attention and should be displayed as little as possible. While in other countries with a similar history, monuments, museums and all kinds of publications feed the memory and keep it alive, there is hardly any evidence of this in Thailand. For example, I feel it is typical of this attitude that Thailand, unlike Singapore, the Philippines or even Burma, does not have a national holiday to commemorate the war. However, the country has no shortage of holidays….

Memories are subject to constant changes in interpretation and meaning. Nothing, in my opinion, reflects this better than the way a country thinks it should treat places that recall painful moments in its history and how they frame these events in their culture of remembrance. If attention is paid in Thailand to the tragedy of the Thai-Burma railway(s), then the focus is on the Farang, the Western prisoners of war. Symptomatic of the Great Forgetting is that in the two great Railway Museums near Kanchanaburi: the Thailand-Burma Railway Center and the JEATH-museum hardly or no attention is paid to the romusha. Although, as far as the Thailand-Burma Railway Center is concerned, a - modest - sleeve has recently been adjusted. In Hellfire Pass the memory of the romusha is kept alive, but the opening and management of this site was therefore not a Thai but an Australian initiative.

As early as March 1944 – still in the midst of war – a first step was taken to commemorate the thousands who had lost their lives during the laborious construction of the Thai-Burma railway. Bizarrely or surprisingly, the initiators were the Japanese. On the banks of the Kwae not far from the bridges at Tha Makham, a simple concrete cenotaph, a memorial column for those who were given a final resting place elsewhere, was erected to a design by one of the railway engineers. At the four corners of the walls surrounding the cenotaph, marble plaques in English, Dutch, Thai, Burmese, Tamil, Malaysian, Indonesian and Vietnamese paid tribute to those who lost their lives in the construction of the Thai-Burma railway . On a separate plaque at the back of the column is a memento for the fallen Japanese military and civilian personnel. According to a tough legend, the marble slabs on which these texts were written were originally tabletops confiscated by the Japanese from Sino-Thai families in Bangkok.

The unveiling of this memorial naturally evoked - and this to this day - very mixed feelings among the Allied prisoners of war and perhaps also among the romusha. It remains a strange gesture by the Japanese, but it is nevertheless important that the Japanese armed forces, as the builder of this project so costly in human lives, recognized that the construction of the railway had caused many victims and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people… The Thai government that hand – and tension services that facilitated the construction of this infamous railway never officially did so…

Incidentally, a second memorial was built by the Japanese at Kanchanaburi. In 1995 it became Lat Ya Peace Memorial Park opened along the road from Kanchanaburi to Erawan waterfall. It is an initiative of the otherwise unknown Japan Committee for Asian Peace, which wants to keep alive the memory of all victims, including romusha, Japanese and Koreans. Through a Shinto-style gate with the rather strange-looking inscription Yamato damashi , loosely translated 'the spirit of the Yamato race', one reaches a monument decorated with the flags of Great Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, Thailand, Japan and South Korea. On a blue and white plaque with a logo that resembles that of the United Nations, 'The Laborers of Asia' commemorated.

Soon 3.770 Allied victims, 3.149 from the British Commonwealth and 621 Dutch people who died in Burma will be commemorated on Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery. 6.511 Commonwealth and 2.206 Dutch victims are commemorated in Thailand on Chungkai War Camery en Kanchanaburi War Cemetery. 11 Indian soldiers who were interred separately at Muslim cemeteries in the area are commemorated on the Kanchanaburi Memorial next to the entrance of it War cemetery. The straight-lined rows of tombstones seem to go on endlessly in these cemeteries that are visibly maintained. However, there are no cemeteries or individual headstones for the romusha who died in the construction of the two Thai-Burma railways. With a bit of luck, thanks to a helpful hand of friends, they got a hastily dug shallow final resting place in the jungle or in some long-forgotten mass grave. The others were dumped as waste in some river or left to rot in the jungle... Only one - posthumous - exception: After a mass grave was found in Kanchanaburi in November 1990, the remains were cremated. Without much ceremony they were buried under a shelteriden funerary monument at the Sino-Thai cemetery of Kanchanaburi a few hundred meters from the immense Kanchanaburi War Cemetery. However, there is not a word of explanation to be found on site….

It could symbolize how their fate has faded from the collective consciousness of the war in the Pacific. Especially in the West, where there is a tendency to focus exclusively on the terrible experiences of the Allied prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma railway. Authors, whether historians or cultural scholars like myself, hold monologues about the past. The dialogue is there for the rest of the world…. From a moral and historicizing point of view, it is more than time for the last surviving romusha to get their story and their agony finally acknowledged. If only as an answer to the indifference and ignorance that they had experienced for decades. If only to do justice to the countless nameless victims who have remained behind there and whose bones, bleaching under the bright tropical sun, are slowly but oh so surely ground by the wheels of time. Until even the memory is gone…