When farmers have been deceived by the cities, believe the food problem is their own, say that we must at all costs stop the importation of rice, and demand that government rice stocks be opened — when even the farmers begin to talk this way — we can only say that their delusions and stupidity have attained the zenith. Are they trying to bring about again that terrible past of plunder when our ancestors, in years of famine, had even their own stocks of rice taken from them as tax, and starved to death in shame? We must not be fooled by their demands to break out the stored rice. Even if you have to throw it in the gutter, don't give it to the city. This will be the best means of bringing about the shrinkage of the cities. Let the cities import food if they like. When in their dangerous tightrope act they run up against some unforeseen circumstance, it will be of NO concern to the farmers.
Why Feed the Hand that Pollutes?
"The farmers have a duty to provide the citizens (actually the cities) with food." This is the noble-sounding great cause that the city always brandishes, and the farmers believe it without question. This faith of the farmers is proof of what I meant previously when I said that the city (that is, the secondary and tertiary industries) changes a problem that completely controls its own destiny into one which controls that of the farmers, and through this deft trickery attempts to solve its food problem by sacrificing the farmers. And since this is blind faith, the farmers do not realize at all that this is a trick; the city coolly gives the farmers the responsibility for the food problem, and the farmers themselves take on this responsibility wholeheartedly. The city, in other words, has made the farmers believe blindly that supplying the cities with food is their duty.
A duty to feed the citizens (cities)? There is no such thing! I may be repeating myself, but this "duty" is nothing more than an artifice invented by the city — which cannot live even a day without robbing food from the farmers — to take that food; such an unwritten law has not, of course, always existed as a law of Nature. Did not Nature decree that we either gather or produce our own food?
We must not be deceived. Though you farmers believe from the bottom of your hearts that "agriculture is a sacred profession," that is but a belief brought about as a result of your having fallen prey to the city's plundering stratagems, and is no different from before when, controlled by the slogan "Japan is the nation of the gods," young men from the farms gave their lives for the state.
Farmers! When you believe that "farming is the sacred profession," [16] when you fall for the idea that "the farmers have a duty to supply food to the citizens," when, with sweat on your brow and mud on your hands, you are put on the run by your machines in order to answer to the demand for great quantities of food, you are preserving and promoting the "evils of the city" that I outlined in Chapter II.
That which you nourish by working your fingers to the bone is none other than the source of all pollution, the root of all evil, that is, the city dwellers, the prodigal sons. In view of this situation, the "sacred profession" in which you believe is actually an evil that nourishes evil. We must immediately root it out.
If we do not eradicate this evil, there will soon be no hope for us. There is absolutely no reason why you must expose yourself to dangerous agricultural chemicals, suffer under onerous debts, and work yourself into the ground in order to feed the likes of those who make cigarettes, food additives, cars, and jet planes, thus spreading pollution all over the place; those who make guns, bullets, nuclear weapons, and preparations for murder; the people who force needless governmental services onto us; or people like singers, dancers, and athletes who make their living by exciting others.
I will say it once again: Don't answer their demands for great supplies of food! A shortage of the staple food, rice, is an excellent opportunity for us. If the city people do not have enough to eat they will realize their error, and this will engender the shrinkage of the cities, which will in turn bring about the amelioration of the city's evils. This is what Ando Shoeki meant when he said, "The idle and gluttonous should simply be punished by death."
The Alternatives Pressing Humankind