The age when people inherited farms from their parents is coming to a close. Children who grew up watching their parents labor hard on the farm rarely ever choose to follow in their parents' footsteps, and experiences. Of course things are different for people who are in line to be doctors, teachers, or actors -- professions which can skim the sweet juices (jobs which, no matter how hard one must study, offer far greater financial rewards than farming) -- but most farm children choose not to follow in their parents' footsteps, so they study hard, get into a university, and choose a fruitful profession (one that makes them a lot of money). 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.