Chapter 5

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.