Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 2:44 PM
Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan. But this is no alien creation. The designs have been cleverly planted.
Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different colors of rice plants have been precisely and strategically arranged and grown on the paddy fields.
As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artworks begin to emerge.
A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants, the colors created by using different varieties.
The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate, 600 miles north of Tokyo, where the tradition began in 1993.
The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry. The enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall.
Every summer, more than 150,000 visitors come to Inakadate to see the extraordinary murals.
Each year, hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields.
Napolean on horseback can be seen from the skies, created by precision planting and months of planning.
Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear on rice fields in the town of Yonezawa, Japan. And over the past few years, other villages have joined in with the plant designs. Various artworks have popped up in other rice-farming areas of Japan, which include designs of deer dancers.
Smaller works of crop art such as Doraemon and deer dancers can be seen on other rice-farming areas of Japan. The farmers create the crop murals by planting little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety to create the coloured patterns between planting and harvesting in September.
The crop murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square metres of paddy fields. From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to get a glimpse of the artworks.
Closer to the image, the careful placement of thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen. The different varieties of rice plant grow alongside each other to create the masterpieces.
In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki every year. But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention.
In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art. A year later, organisers used computers to precisely plot the planting of the four differently-colored rice varieties that bring the images to life.
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