Awesome Art..      
    
    

 

 








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  color's of rice plants have been precisely and  strategically arranged and grown in the paddy  fields.

As summer progresses and  the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins  to emerge.


A Sengoku  warrior on horseback has been created from  hundreds of thousands of rice  plants,  the color's created by using  different varieties, in Inakadate in  Japan

The largest and finest work  is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate,   600 miles north of  Toyko, where the tradition began in  1993.

The village has now earned a  reputation for its agricultural artistry and  this year
the enormous pictures of  Napoleon and a Sengoku-period  warrior,
both on horseback, are visible  in a pair of fields adjacent to the town  hall.

More than 150,000 vistors  come to Inakadate,
where just 8,700  people live, every summer 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 between  villagers and farmers in  Inkadate
 



Fictional  warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear  in fields in the town of Yonezawa ,  Japan

And over the past few years,  other villages have joined in with the plant  designs.

Another famous rice paddy  art venue is in the town of Yonezawa in the  Yamagata prefecture.

This year's  design shows the fictional 16th-century samurai  warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen,  whose lives feature in television series  Tenchijin.

Various artwork has  popped up in other rice-farming areas of Japan  this year, including designs of deer  dancers.



Smaller works  of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming  areas of Japan such as this image of Doraemon  and deer dancers

The farmers create  the 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  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  work.

Rice-paddy art was started  there in 1993 as a local revitalization project,  an idea that grew out of meetings of the village  committee.



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 planting of the four differently colored  rice varieties that bring the images to  life.

Blessings

Dan Benor, MD