From: fstawit@icomp01.lerc.nasa.gov (Tawit Chitsomboon)
Subject: Japanese-Land-Dead ( Was:-Re: My opinion about Khun Chuan.
Organization: Institute for Computational Mechanics in Propulsion-NASA LeRC
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 15:39:19 GMT

In article <1992Nov8.043555.981@news2.cis.umn.edu> 
bunt0003@student.tc.umn.edu () writes:
>In article <1992Nov6.215521.9266@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov> 
fstawit@icomp01.lerc.nasa.gov (Tawit Chitsomboon) writes:
>>.....................
>>Seriously, could you or someone else tell me what is bad about older
>>Japanese retiring in Thailand? I notice in one of Carabau's song also
>>about this anti-Japanese retirement community.
>>-Tawit
>
>No, not at all Khun Tawit.  I'm not anyway antiJapanese or any other
>nationalities what so ever.  Being a Buddhist and a humanist myself, I
>believe strongly that people should be allowed to move or stay whereever
>they wish as long as they don't cause trouble to their fellow human.
>The fact that my x girl friend is Japanese ...........................
>
>Thian


You must be much more handsome than me. I tried to smile to many Japanese
gals in the campus (when I was young) and no one smiled back. :-(

I got an email responding to my post about Japanese retiring in Thailand.
The email said that the main draw back is that it drives the land price
sky high so that average Thai cannot compete to own a house anymore.
Once land price is up, it'll never come down again. He goes on to give
many reasons as to why we should protect our 'land'.

I very much agreed with this gentleman. IMO, there are ways to work around
this. Perhaps the gov should manage this by themself. They could sell 
to the developer with fair-market value of the land and requires
that the development be atleast 10-story high condo and each unit shall
have no more than x square metres of utilizing area, etc., to limit the
consumption of the land. They could allow developments only at certain
locations far away from a big city like Chiangmai so that the development
could benefit the rural local areas. The bottom line is: if we really
want this kind of money from the Japanese, we can always find ways
to compromise/optimize.

When I give more thought to the issue, I could sense that the retirees
are probably low to middle class people who are too poor to live
in Japan but rich enough to come to Thailand. Poorer than this and they
can't afford to come. Richer than this and they don't want to come.

What I don't know is, what type of VISA do these people hold?
There must be a G-to-G agreement of some sort, I guess.

One thing I would like to see imposed is that corpses be cremated rather
than burried (like the traditional Chinese). Chinese in Thailand are
getting so rich that they bought many prime lands in surrounding provinces
of BKK like Chonburi, Saraburi, and turned them into cemetaries.

My mom-in-law was burried in a beautiful, moutainous Chonburi under
an 80 square-Wa of land (about 3300 sq ft). The cost of the whole thing
was 700K something. I knew my mom didn't want it because she's a frugal
type and a dhammic-minded lady but the male-children (who had the total say)
wanted it that way. They think (according to Chinese tradition) that
they will be prosperous if they take good care of their parents' tomp.
(I thought they did it because they loved their mom so much :-)
If I had a say, I would say cremate mom and use the money to build a
library for a rural area school in her honor.

The Japanese have the same 'big' burial tradition like the Chinese.
Is that one of the reason they come to Thailand, hoping that when they
die, they can be burried in a big plot of land at the foot of a majectic
mountain so that their children can come to pay homage to their corpses
once every year?

It's kind of inhumane to impose people on their funeral practices but
if something is not done now there sure will be frictions in the future
when agricultural land is more and more yieding to golf courses and 
cemetaries.

-Tawit

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