The Japanese Village in Ayutthaya is one of the former royal capital’s most popular historical sites for both Thai and international visitors. Known from early modern European accounts, the Japanese community that flourished there in the early seventeenth century has attracted considerable scholarly attention, particularly in the early twentieth century, though much less so in recent decades.

This lecture offers a comprehensive history of the Japanese settlement in Ayutthaya based on a re-examination of European, Japanese, and Thai primary sources, as well as a rereading of earlier scholarship on Ayutthaya–Japan relations, especially the works of the Japanese historian Seiichi Iwao (岩生成一, 1900–1988), alongside more recent studies of early Tokugawa foreign policy and the construction of an imagined Japanocentric world order.

The lecture will present a detailed chronology of the Japanese Village and situate Ayutthaya–Japan relations within the broader context of early modern Japanese foreign relations. It also reconsiders the lives and historical significance of the settlement’s two most famous inhabitants, Yamada Nagamasa and Maria Guyomar de Pina (Thao Thong Kip Ma, ท้าวทองกีบม้า), offering new interpretations of their roles in Siamese–Japanese history.