"Fatalistic Attitude"
I have been wondering a bit about that in the last few days. We spent a few days at Kanchanaburi, a little town known mainly, to Westerners, as the site of the Bridge over the River Kwai.
According to the local museums, which are a little rough and ready, 67,000 Western prisoners were held near here by the Japanese and used to build the railway and approximately 13,700 of them died. That is bad enough. What set me back on my heels though was a small addendum in one of the museum exhibits that mentioned that as many as 270,000 Asians were also used as slave labour on the railway and the nearest estimate anyone can find is that only some 30,000 were eventually repatriated. That is the single and only mention I can find of all those prisoners and I have been wondering just who they were and why, when so many were lost, it is the Westerner's contingent that are so memorialised.
Perhaps we are more meticulous about records, perhaps we are more easily offended about the treatment of our fellow countrymen, perhaps in the years after the war the spread of stories and news was better in our Western societies but I suspect that Eastern fatalism is also a very significant factor. "They are gone, what can you do? We'll just move on with life."
And that may have quite a bit to do with Thais attitude to accident investigation and reporting. We are now enjoying Koh Samui. So mny things are really enjoyable here, including the good humour of the locals. It is an easy country to like.
We came by overnight train (Much better than the ones we had in Europe, if showing their age just a little.) We're going ack to Bangkok by air. . . . . . I'll let you know . . . . . . . .