Editing SG32NNU-T (section)

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'''A:''' The rural problem has become an awfully pressing issue. There’s no question that it is something everyone must think about.

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'''B:''' All kinds of measures have been studied, but nobody really seems to know what to do, do they? Labor disputes and tenant-farmer disputes have caused plenty of commotion before, but this rural problem feels different—as though society were being shaken up from the roots. Things like the recent peasant ×× are surely one manifestation of that.<ref>The two crosses (××) appear in the original and presumably indicate censored or suppressed text.</ref>

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'''A:''' After all, the rural problem is a matter of life and death for the farming households that make up more than half the country. And because it is also a problem involving the lifeline of the cities, it is really a problem of the stomach of society as a whole. So naturally it feels different. Lately I’ve been reading the ''Asahi Shimbun'' reports entitled “The Actual Conditions of the Distressed Countryside,” and they make the life of those fellows who don’t work at all and stuff themselves full of white rice seem almost sinful.

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'''B:''' According to those reports, the average farm household in every prefecture carries a debt of eight or nine hundred yen. Across Japan as a whole, the countryside is shackled hand and foot by an enormous debt of five billion yen.

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'''A:''' Eight or nine hundred yen per household may not sound like an enormous debt, but the price of rice has fallen terribly, and their sole source of income has dried up. Even now the channels of credit simply aren’t functioning, which makes the hardship all the worse. They are squeezed by the landlords and squeezed by the cities. There is this double exploitation, and on top of it they are burdened with public taxes and charges two or three times greater than those paid by commercial and industrial operators with the same income. Even in a good harvest year they have to endure the bitter irony of a “good-harvest hell”<ref>“Good-harvest hell” (''hōnen jigoku'' 豊年地獄) refers to the paradoxical—and for Seno’o, tragic—situation in which an abundant harvest depressed agricultural prices so severely that farmers could become poorer rather than richer.</ref>; and when the harvest fails, you get the misery we saw last year in Tōhoku. However you look at it, the countryside is hemmed in on every side. No wonder the farmer stands on the path between his fields, wondering what on earth he is supposed to do.

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