Tookamachi (Japan), Aug 30 (DPA) Yoshiaki Fukuzaki glanced across a dozen rice terraces clinging to a steep slope, a serious expression on his face.

'It is getting increasingly difficult to maintain these terraces,' said the village official in Tookamachi, a community of about 62,000 in the central Japanese province of Niigata.

Rice farming is the residents' lifeblood, but there are too few to take up where their forebears have left off. The few children who are born tend to move to the cities once they have finished their basic education.

'In many villages more than half of the inhabitants are older than 65. The future of our community looks gloomy,' said Fukuzaki.

Villages like Tookamachi are increasingly common across Japan, a country affected by dropping birth rates and increasing life expectancy, and no one knows whether the ageing of the population can be halted.

People increasingly wonder whether the high standard of living, which the current generation of retirees has worked hard to achieve, can be maintained or if the progressing division of society into winners or losers is inevitable.

Japan's pension system is over-stretched, the times of huge economic growth have ended, every third worker holds only a temporary contract and unemployment figures have reached unprecedented heights.

More than 30,000 people commit suicide each year.

Ever fewer Japanese believe the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled almost uninterrupted for more than 50 years, can solve those problems.

For decades, the party based its power on patronage, supplying its clientele in farming and the construction business with generous handouts, while the powerful bureaucracy planned and executed day-to-day and economic policies.

But this system, in which the LDP elites enjoyed the public's trust as proverbial 'power professionals', is rapidly becoming unworkable as overall government debt has doubled over the past few years.

'It is already five minutes past 12,' an analyst said, and Japan's voters have apparently realised that as well.

For the very first time one single party -- the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) -- has the opportunity to break the LDP's power monopoly.