Planning Kra Canal across the Malay Peninsular : Correlation and Conflict between Japan and Britain

マレー　ハントウ　オウダン　ウンガ　ケイカク　クラ　チキョウ　ヲ　メグル　ニチエイ　ノ　ソウカン　ト　ショウトツ

ハシモト, ヨリミツ

Hashimoto, Yorimitsu

大阪大学大学院言語文化研究科言語社会専攻海外連携特別コース

チャールズ・ダンロップ

齋藤幹

岩本千綱

草野馨

モーリス・コリス

高見順

ヴィクトリア・ポイント

泰緬鉄道

タイ運河

一帯一路

Kra Canal

Charles Dunlop

Kan Saito

Chizuna Iwamoto

Kaoru Kusano

Maurice Collis

Jun Takami

Victoria Point

Thai-Burma Railway

Thai Canal

One Belt and One Road initiative

In the latter half of the 1930s, it was often reported that the Government of Japan was constructing the Kra Canal, which would stretch across the Malay Peninsula. The source of the rumor, however, was a poor private investment project by Kaoru Kusano, father of the poet Shinpei Kusano. In December 1941, a part of the Japanese army invaded British Burma through the Kra Isthmus. The writer Jun Takami was ordered to serve in the siege of Victoria Point and released a propaganda report immediately after the campaign. Upon returning home Takami produced several novels that echoed the works of Maurice Collis, which he had read in Burma. In the novels Takami also created characters based on Chizuna Iwamoto, an explorer advocating strategic immigration to Southeast Asia. Kusano's plan was partially realised as the Kra Isthmus Railway in December 1943. The railway however was bombed and removed by the Allied forces around 1945. Pan-Asian transport network including the Kra Canal envisioned in the novel Utopian Future of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (written by Shinpei Kusano's friend in 1942) may have been partially transformed and incorporated into China's One Belt and One Road initiative.