On the other hand, the use of distinguishing terms like "ethnic group" and "race" breeds racism, small-mindedness, and exclusivism, so perhaps it would be better to employ terms like "humanity" or "Earth people."
But since my discussion in this chapter concerns mainly the island country of Japan, I will ask the reader's indulgence and slip by with this makeshift term.
46
A social structure in which few farmers feed a great number of idlers forces the farmers into labor-saving, high-yield, mass-supply agriculture, and this necessitates the heavy use of agricultural chemicals and chemical fertilizers, as well as making the farmers neglect the application of compost to the land. The inevitable result is oil-soaked fields and a kind of agriculture characterized by contamination, plunder, and destruction. One could also say that the idlers, by means of the progress of science and technology, have promoted the mechanization and contamination of agriculture, thus making it possible for a handful of farmers to feed legions of idlers. The city sucks up everything.
Therefore food contamination is, simply put, brought about by the social structure, not by the laziness and greed of farmers.
Needless to say, the contempt for agriculture and the priority of the secondary and tertiary industries are also causes of the fall in the farming population. When over half the people were farmers, half the content of our language and song books were based in the farming villages, and the stories and songs glorified agriculture and the farmers, but now that less than half the population are farmers, such stories and songs have all but disappeared. For the same reason, one rarely if ever sees the farming villages or the farmers in television shows or in the piles of magazines and novels.
In this case it is an inversion to say that the contempt for agriculture and the respect for urban industries have brought about the reduction in the farm population. Changes in the social structure are brought about by the power relationships of material productive capacity (or the money economy); social trends and consciousness is merely a reflection of such.
Therefore the contempt for agriculture is not a problem of education or attitude, but decidedly one of social structure.
47
This is the main theme of this chapter, and so I will write in more detail about this later. But now I would like to emphasize here that increasing the agrarian population (that is, sending the secondary/tertiary population back to the farms), getting everyone to pull weeds by hand, make compost, give up agricultural chemicals, and produce modest quantities of clean vegetables, while being our goal, is quite impossible and unrealistic unless we solve the land problem.