Nature has repeated the same cycle over and over again for billions of years. If agriculture, which is in an inextricably close relationship with this cycle, shows unusual progress and development (by accepting the intervention of the secondary and tertiary industries) in spite of this relationship with the natural cycle, then it is not at all surprising that distortion will arise. By distortion I mean the contamination of the land (our food), the loss of topsoil, the accumulation of salts in the soil, and the loss of humus. If we assume that progress in agriculture has made our lives more affluent, then we must pay a terrible price for that affluence. In order to live an extravagant "life," we must give up our survival. CHAPTER III NOTES 19 By invading the country and urbanizing it, the city is, more than anything else, destroying the very source of its life. 20 Please note that I do not support any of the barbarisms perpetrated by Pol Pot. 21 Since in those days (the feudal age) the feudal lords seized food directly from the farmers, there was no need to include the farmers in the monetary economy. The farmers were dragged into the monetary economy when the Meiji government decreed the switch from payment in kind to cash payment. 22 A literal rendering of one of the Japanese words for "farmer." (Translator's note). 23 It is said that even in space everything disintegrates in the end, but if a part of the universe (for example, the Milky Way Galaxy) disintegrates, the planets and stars turning to dust and scattering throughout space, then this becomes interstellar matter which floats about in space; this dust again gathers to form stars, and a new system is born. This too is the repetitious movement of the universe, movement which requires tens of billions of years. Chapter IV The Origin of the Cities Just as the sun exists in the heavens, the cities exist on Earth. Just as there is water in the great oceans, there are the cities on land. Or at least this is what most people seem to believe. If one does not believe so, then it would probably be impossible to blithely make one's home in the city. But sorry to say, the city is nothing at all like the sun or the oceans, for it has only the most tenuous, bubble-like existence. The World before the Appearance of the City