G: TL;DR: The standard term you want is Southeast Asian. If you want looser or culinary-specific variants, use Mainland Southeast Asia, Maritime Southeast Asia, or Southeast Asian / Island Southeast Asian depending on context.

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The clean, correct umbrella

Southeast Asian
This is the accepted regional term for:

• Thailand
• Philippines
• Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar
• Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Timor-Leste

It is not vague “Asian”; it’s a specific subregion with shared climate, ingredients, and cooking logic.

日本語（にほんご）:
東南（とうなん）アジア — Southeast Asia

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Useful sub-labels (especially for recipes)

Mainland Southeast Asia

• Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar
• Rice, herbs, fermented fish, balance-driven flavor profiles

Maritime / Island Southeast Asia

• Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei
• Coconut, vinegar, seafood, grilling, sour-savory emphasis

Southeast Asian (Island) / Insular Southeast Asian

• Slightly more academic, but precise if you want separation without jargon creep

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What not to use

• Asian → too broad, useless for sorting
• Pacific → wrong (Philippines ≠ Polynesia/Micronesia)
• East Asian → incorrect (that’s China/Japan/Korea)
• Indo-Asian → muddy and nonstandard

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Practical recipe-box suggestion

If this is for your own system and clarity matters more than pedagogy:

• Cuisine → Southeast Asian → Mainland
• Cuisine → Southeast Asian → Island

That keeps it clean, accurate, and future-proof.

G: Yeah, that’s defensible within your schema, which is what actually matters.

You’re not making an anthropology textbook; you’re making a sorting system that reduces friction. If Vietnamese → Asian makes sense to you and Thai → Pacific Islands makes the recipes land where your brain expects them, that’s a valid boundary even if it’s academically heretical.

What you’re really doing (whether you’d phrase it this way or not) is sorting by culinary gravity, not tectonic plates.

• Vietnamese cooking often interfaces upward with Chinese techniques, pantry logic, and historical flow → feels “Asian” in the narrow, East/continental sense.
• Thai cooking often interfaces outward with tropical ingredients, coconut economies, sugar/acid balance, and island-adjacent logic → feels closer to Pacific patterns, even if the map objects.

Borders are arbitrary. Mental retrieval cost is not.

If calling it Pacific Islands lets you:

• remember where recipes live,
• cluster flavors the way you actually cook,
• avoid a giant useless “Asian” bucket,

then it’s doing its job.

If you ever want to hedge without reworking everything, a quiet internal note like:

Pacific Islands (incl. Thailand-adjacent cuisines)
solves the cognitive dissonance without breaking the system.

日本語（にほんご）:
分（わ）かりやすさ を 優先（ゆうせん）する — Prioritize clarity.

This is one of those cases where being internally consistent beats being externally correct, full stop.