Recent days I stumbled upon this article titled Pimp my rice paddy. The article and the pictures caught my eye. According to Pink Tentacle, each year, farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture create works of crop art by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety.
And this year’s creation — a pair of grassy reproductions of famous woodblock prints from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji — has begun to appear like the picture shown above. It will be visible until the rice is harvested in September. The picture shown below is the planning and work in progress of planting the seeds into the field, photoed back in May 27th. To be honest, I don’t know how they planning out the plan and how they precisely planted them into the right position because the crop art is pretty complicated and huge!
Inakadate’s farmers already practice this activities since years ago (can be traced since 1993), and they already created some magnificent work of art like pictures shown below. And it actually influence other towns’ farmers to do the same too. I think is pretty good because can grow food and doing something creative at the same time. Two benefit in an activity, brilliant!
Japanese crop art vs crop circle
Maybe you will start to think that this Japanese crop art is similar to Western crop circle (i mean those man-made one). Well, there is something different is the Japanese crop art that is planned carefully and the art only came be seen when the crop is fully grown, while the crop circle is appeared in middle of nowhere which causes surprises. Besides that, the Japanese is “growing” the art, while crop circles is produced by stepping down the crops, thus create the shape.
For more research and reading, visit:
1. www.vill.inakadate.aomori.jp,
2. www.am.askanet.ne.jp and
3. 田んぼアート（たんぼアート, Tanbo art）Japan Wikipedia.
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