Down with the Cities Part 4

The City and Food

-- The Excess, Insufficiency, and Importation of Rice --

Whether or not to import rice is COMPLETELY the problem of the city. Can there truly be a reason why the farmers must be up in arms over this issue?

It is absurd that this problem of rice excesses and shortages should be fussed over as if it controlled the fate of the farmers! [14]

The Farmers Have No "Food Problem"

Originally farmers were people who grew their own food and survived on that, and if because of frosts they lost half their rice crops, they would get along on the half they were able to harvest. The cities (consumers), however, receive the full impact of that lost half of the rice crop, so this must therefore be considered a big problem which completely controls the fate of the city. If on the other hand there is a bountiful harvest of rice the farmers have cause for celebration, and have no reason to consider this a burden. Even if they have far too much rice for themselves they can give it to their domestic animals, and if they still have some left over (or if they have no animals) they can return it to the earth.

It is also of no concern to the farmers whether the city decides to import rice or not (there is no reason why farmers must eat imported rice even though they still have some stored), so this is therefore purely the consumers' problem. Thus it comes down to being simply a matter of the city securing its staple food from its own country or another country, and making the wrong choice could mean running out of food. If the city relies upon another country for its staple food, and this supply is for some reason interrupted, then logic dictates it is the people in the cities, and not the farmers, who will be in a pickle.

Don't tell me that this is my egotism. What I want to make plain here is that the city (the system) is taking a problem that completely controls its own destiny, and making it look as though it controls the destiny of the farmers, thereby trying to solve the entire food problem by sacrificing the farmers. This is nothing other than another one of the city's deceptive stratagems. Nothing exhibits the stupidity of the farmers to the world more than their being taken in by this trick, and then going down to the ports to demonstrate against the importation of rice. [15]

The insufficiency and importation of rice is the perfect chance to eliminate (or at least shrink) the cities. Farmers! If there is a shortage of rice, we should reduce, not increase, production. Help promote the rice shortage! Don't oppose rice imports! Until the authorities take action, voluntarily reduce your rice acreage! Produce only enough for yourself and your animals! If you prepare yourself for an austere life, then it is the cities, and not the farmers, who will find themselves in a bind.

If the trees do not produce many nuts, then the number of squirrels will decrease. It is a self-evident truth that, if supplies of the staple food fall, the number of cities will be reduced correspondingly.

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 circ.u.mstance, 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 n.o.ble-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 "j.a.pan is the nation of the G.o.ds," 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 quant.i.ties 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

Let us note that allowing land to lay idle is, as a matter of fact, the best possible way to make the switch to organic farming. It is said that making a sudden switch to organic farming is difficult for our arable land, which has been ruined by agricultural chemicals and chemical fertilizers, but if one lets the land lay idle and avails oneself of the following method, the land will come back to life in only one year, and one will be able to raise good rice with absolutely no agricultural chemicals or chemical fertilizers.

On idle paddies just dump great quant.i.ties of such things as straw, gra.s.s, chicken manure, garbage from your kitchen, and dregs and lees from starch and tofu, if you can get them free.

After you have done this, the weeds will grow luxuriously. Cut them and then either let them lie as they are, or (if you have animals) feed them to your animals and return the weeds to the soil in the form of manure. If you continue this for one season you will find that the next year, even if you begin with no fertilizer at all, mature seedlings planted a little late and wider apart than usual will grow beautifully and strong, and you will get big ears of rice even without adding any fertilizer during the season. Truly great is the recovery power of Nature.

By letting some land lay idle you can get two birds with one stone: begin the shrinkage of the cities, and manage the switch to organic agriculture. Remember, the object here is not to produce great quant.i.ties of rice, but to produce healthy rice without the use of chemicals; if the farmers eat just a little good-quality rice, that is all that matters.

Now at this time a food panic will arise, and it is inevitable that the cities will ransack the farming villages in their search for rice. But if we do not get rid of the pus, the sore will not heal. In the attempt to deal a blow to the powerful cities, we must prepare ourselves for a little bloodletting. It may be expecting too much to achieve our goal without payment of any kind.

Whether in the country or in the cities, we are faced with two clear alternatives, represented by the following two att.i.tudes: "As long as I can gain happiness (extravagance and prosperity) now, it's all right if humanity perishes in the future," and "Even if we experience more unhappiness (austerity and a smaller scale lifestyle) than at present, humanity will survive." These are the alternatives, and we must choose one of them.

I think that, even if there is a little bloodletting, and even if the cities retreat and life becomes much more inconvenient and difficult than it is now, we should let the human race continue to exist on this Earth.

Fortunately, a full belly (extravagance) engenders laziness, but an empty belly (austerity) engenders hope. As long as, ensconced in the midst of plenty, we continue our extravagant lives, we will never have the opportunity to experience real happiness.

Supplementary Comment on "Rice Shortages"

It is said that the rice shortage (a shortage of a magnitude that brought about the need to import rice) is the result of four continuous years of bad weather, but a bigger cause is man-made -- the meddling of the city.

The first of the city's mistakes is its infamous policy of reducing rice acreage. To say that "since there's too much rice you must till fewer paddies" is nothing more than a kindergartner's idea for a solution. Is this the best idea that the elite bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture could come up with? And when we see that the politicians representing the farming villages just let this pa.s.s, it is obvious that they are not much smarter.

Long ago, in China, they say that even with nine years' worth of rice stored they still had shortages. So what is all the excitement over a three or four months' excess?

You, in the cities! This is the rice you're eating. Offer all those office buildings as rice storage facilities. We should fill those buildings up with unhulled rice. Should there ever be a food shortage, all those office buildings and hotels will be worthless compared to rice. When the Pol Pot regime inst.i.tuted the barter system, the capitol of Phnom Penh was instantly converted into an empty sh.e.l.l. This is because the former residents left the hotels and offices behind and went from farming village to farming village in search of food. If we were to set a nine years' supply of rice as our goal there would be no shortages because of frost damage, and no need to import rice; at the same time there would be no need for an acreage reduction policy.

In such a situation there should be no need to discuss costs.

Since this is the rice that they would all be eating, they should do the work for free. When it comes down to actually carrying out this plan, the money economy will probably fall apart, anyway.

[17]

The second of the human-caused disasters is the infrastructure industry. In order to build infrastructure, the government blows trillions of yen destroying the paddies tilled by generations of ancestors, and for that reason we are seeing a reduction in the rice harvests (let us not overlook the effects of the dense planting by machines, the damage due to causing the rice to grow too thickly, and the ill effects of the great quant.i.ties of chemicals).

The government says that the farmers benefit from infrastructure, but we are actually the victims of it. In reality those who benefit are the government; the farming co-ops; the manufacturers of machines, fertilizers, and agricultural chemicals; the rice wholesalers; and the consumers, all of whom belong to the cities. What this means is that the city has created a system by which it can control the production of our staple food as it pleases. The stupid farmers have given the city permanent control over the production of rice for a mere pittance in subsidies.