Rice-paddy Art in Japan

Who say framers can only grow crops with handy work?

In the era of knowledge economy, proactive farmers can also play masterpiece of crop art in the field with no ink or dye.

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Inakadate, Japan. Clever farmers display their designs in the rice fields. rice plants of various colors are precisely and strategically ploted to grow in the paddy fields.

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


Using different varieties of colors, a Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants.

The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate, 600 miles north of Toyko. The rice-paddy art tradition began in 1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew out of meetings of the village committee.

Since then, the village has earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry.


This year there are enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback.

More than 150,000 vistors travel 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.


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.

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.


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.

PS: Write-up adapted from original article sent by Lim Keng.