Thank you for the translation of そよかぜ: the font was too stylish for my basic hiragana.
Thank you also for the link to the interview with Seto: I'm in the process of getting parts of his autobio translated from Thai into English and it may help in clarifying some murky points. He wrote it in Japanese and I believe a limited edition was published in Bangkok in 2002: I don't have the publication data for this. The two volumes were then translated into Thai and published, one by one, in 2005 and 2006 in Bangkok, and those are what I'm working with.
This multi-lingual sequence is somewhat similar to my brief interface with Seto last November in northern Thailand. He was returning from a tour of WW II sites in western Mae Hong Son and wanted to research a report that IJA troops retreating from Burma had been massacred in Muang Noi (N19°30.7 E98°30.8), a mountain village north of Pai.
The effort culminated in a scene in a small humble three-sided shelter serving as a store/restaurant in very rural Muang Noi where Seto interviewed a local Thai. Seto, fluent in Thai and Japanese, but not English, conducted the interview. He provided a running translation into Japanese for his friend and host for the tour, David Boggett, who is fluent in English and Japanese. Boggett then translated that into English for mono-lingual me. So Thai to Japanese to English. I had to recall the parlor game, "telephone message", in which a message is whispered around a table with the last person usually receiving a message vastly different from the original message. Seto's conclusion from the interview was not distorted, however: he was confident that the massacre could not have occurred.
FYI, Seto is mentally sharp, but he is encumbered by poor eyesight which forces him to move slowly and hesitantly for fear of having a fall. Fascinating fellow:
His longevity --- he's now in his late 80s --- may be attributable to spells of a very limited diet in his youth: his autobio recounts being continually hungry, not as a result of limited food supplies during the war, but rather because of a not particularly supportive step-mother.
The problem with eyesight can probably be traced to his having been hit in an eye by a bullet which lodged in his eye socket: apparently the bullet originated from a shooter who fired at least two shots: the first missed (he heard it whiz by), but the second caught him in an eye. Either the shooter was sufficiently distant that the bullet was nearly spent when it hit Seto, or the cartridge was defective. Otherwise, the bullet would have gone into his brain and probably killed him. The eyeball was not seriously damaged and he himself eventually removed the bullet after doctors shied away from the task. This occurred long after the WWII, in 1971, on a mountain hike in Surat Thani in southern Thailand. He may have been a victim, intended or otherwise, of the separatist insurgency in the south which had begun in 1948.
Hak Hakanson
Chiang Mai