The eldest son (almost all children are eldest sons) goes to the university, gets a job, and settles down in the city. In time his parents on the farm grow old, and find that there is no one to inherit the farm and carry on the work; the parents cannot, at this point, demand that their son return to the farm, and the son, for his part, has gained a respectable position, and does not want to sacrifice this in order to become a farmer (besides, he has tasted fully the sweetness of idleness and gluttony, and could not possibly, in such a physical condition, take on the work of a farmer). So he has no choice but to take in his aging parents and look after them. And thus the reduction in the farming population continues.
This phenomenon can be found in every farming village in the country. The people who flowed into the city on the crest of the rapid economic growth tidal wave are now, 30 years later, finding that the time has come to take in their parents, whether they like it or not. This problem will grow rapidly more serious within the next 10 years or so.
Needless to say, as is symbolized by such officialese as "farmland mobility," "coordination of farmland use," and "fostering core farmers," the farmland that thus goes unused will be gathered up and passed into the hands of aggressive farm operators (i.e., those who affirm the good of mass offerings to the city and who like to be on the receiving end of the city's plundering), whereupon they will increase the scale of their operations and carry on with the industrialization of agriculture (this is known as the "intensive" use of farmland). Because of this policy most of the farmland will either be sucked up by such farmers, or will be invaded and exploited by other industries.
However, this policy will be successful only in the easily-accessible farming villages. There will be no dilettantes who, knowing from the start that they will lose money, will rent much farmland in the inconvenient mountain villages where people never made much money to start with. We can therefore expect the farmland in the remote villages to fall into permanent disuse after the aged farmers move to the city.
For those who wish to get out of the city and take up farming, such isolated mountain villages are good places to borrow land and get started. Long ago human beings lived and survived in the foothills of the mountains, so such a place — the border between the plains and the mountains, is certainly the ideal environment for people. Though it may be an economically poor place to live, it is ecologically ideal. * * * Even though one may have left the city and fled to an inconvenient mountain village to take up farming, it is impossible to guarantee that one will thus be able to survive into the twenty-first century. Even if, in the event of a nuclear war, one managed to avoid a full-scale nuclear attack, the Earth will cool as a result of nuclear war, and agriculture will suffer a severe blow. There is no assurance that those who have left the city and taken up farming in the mountains will be safe. One may of course conceal about two years' worth of grain in a pit solo, but there are yet difficult problems such as residual radiation and the pillaging of starving people.
Still, when the city destroys itself by means of its own poisons (the peace of waste, contamination, and destruction), the independent farmers will not, as the modernized mass-offering farmers will, be dragged down with it.
I shall explain the reason for this in the final chapter.
Chapter VIII Notes
45
[The author actually uses a term meaning literally "all the members of an ethnic group farm.">[ The reason I say "ethnic-group farming" instead of "citizen farming" is because I deny the existence of the nation-state. I believe that the nation-state is a power structure, a structure of domination and plunder (i.e., the root of urban evils). If we negate the great evils of the nation-state, then of course the nation-state itself is negated. If we negate the nation-state, then of course there are no "citizens," and what remains is a group of people known as an ethnic group or race.