L ooking at the past seven decades of Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) to Thailand was like looking at how Thailand modernised herself.
Japan has dispatched 12,000 technical experts and 1,100 volunteers to Thailand over the decades, while Thailand sent 33,000 technical trainees to Japan.
The past two decades or so, in particular, saw key infrastructures developed, partly thanks to Japan’s Yen Loan (or low-interest loan) and made possible the completion of Suvarnabhumi International Airport (2006) and the MRT Blue Line (2004). (On top of 14 out of 20 bridges across the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok and nearby provinces.)
These two projects in particular, significantly improved Thailand’s and Bangkok’s infrastructures in a way one cannot fathom how things would have been without these pioneering projects.
Today, Thailand is a major global tourist destination and Bangkok’s mass transport system keeps expanding, creating new satellite towns, reducing traffic congestion, expanding the economy, and making life much more bearable.
On Wednesday, Nov 20, 2024, the Embassy of Japan in Bangkok took the opportunity to show a group of Thai press how Japan assisted Thailand on the occasion of 70 years of Japan’s ODA in Thailand.
The embassy chose two more current projects and by showing us the two projects, we can see the challenges facing Thai society today.
We were first taken to see the MRT Purple Line, which was completed through Japan’s Yen Loan and technical assistance in 2016. It expanded the mass transit network, connecting Tao Poon MRT station to that of Bang Yai station. The day trip was shepherded by Ms Kaamura Maki, the embassy’s counsellor and director of the embassy’s information centre who speaks decent Thai after two years of language lessons at Chulalongkorn University.
(Repayment period for the Purple Line is 25 years, with grace period of 7 years and interest rate of 1.4 percent. The investment cost was 63.7 billion baht). The 16 stations connected Bangkok to nearby Nonthaburi province’s Bang Yai district (about 33 kilometres from Bangkok) and enabled many to live there while conveniently commuting to Bangkok to work.
The Deputy Head of the Mission of the Embassy, Mr Nishioka Tatsushi, dropped by and delivered a short message and said Thailand is a “model case” when it comes to Japan’s ODA to a foreign country but added that as Thailand has become a middle income country, the nature of assistance and cooperation has changed.
A Thai executive at MRT Purple Line spoke to me on the condition that he is not named that going forward, Thailand will face more challenges as to how to keep the fare reasonable enough so more people will use MRT to travel from the satellite towns around Bangkok to the capital to work. (As of September 2024, 72,823 commuters use the line on average daily. )
The fare right now is a flat 20 baht per trip due to the current government’s intervention while normally and prior to that it’s 42 baht for the full length of the line, which is considerably pricey as the minimum daily wage is around 350 baht, making a round trip fare costing roughly a quarter of one’s minimum wage. I told the executive that since we don’t know how long the government can subsidise the fares, such mass transport system is in fact more of a middle-class transport system as poorer people could hardly afford to use them daily.
The executive told me more challenges lie ahead as the government has to bring the private sector to invest in new mass transit lines and that means Thailand’s mass transit fares will be one of the highest in the world. (On what Japan gets in return, the Purple Line uses Toshiba made trains and the stations were adapted from Japanese models.)
Moving to the afternoon, it was a showcase of Japan’s ODA assistance in education. We were taken to meet with administrators and students of KOSEN KMUTT at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, in the outskirts of Bangkok. Here is a new five-year engineering and biology programme for particularly bright students.
The programme was made possible through the yen loan. Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) also provided technical assistance via a number of Japanese lecturers teaching bright young Thais who had to pass two difficult examinations when they were in their middle school to be chosen for the five years education which was fully funded by the Thai government.
Again, these students will be ideal graduates for Japanese firms and factories in Thailand as well as other companies working in areas related to biology, engineering and beyond. (Students in the programme have the opportunity to do the last three years of their five-year course programme at counterpart universities and colleges in Japan.) Thailand will gain too, without doubt.
Unfortunately, while discussing the programme with the Thai administrators, I asked if most of these fully-funded students were basically from the upper middle class background and that most able students from poor families were left out of this programme. The answer was yes. This is another major challenge facing Thailand.
Back to Japan. We are thankful to Japan and they are still assisting Thailand through other ways such as training physically handicapped Thais to make pastry and run bakeries, help Thailand adapt to an aging society, researching on PM 2.5 problems, and more. For all these we are grateful and I am happy to say that unlike back in the 1970s when Japan was seen by some Thais as a threat that would turn Thailand into its economic colony, such fears have been proven false. Japan is no longer the Number One economic powerhouse in Asia (thus much less threatening) and the fears among Thais are now focused on China, rightly or wrongly. But that’s a topic of another column.
