Crop circle - The Asian way

Travel some 600 km north of Tokyo, Japan, in a village in verdant Aomori Prefecture, beautiful art is sprouting out from the rice paddies. It's not a supernatural mystery, as some described over a crop circle usually seen in the Western countries. Instead, by precisely planting four varieties of rice with differently colored leaves in fields their ancestors have farmed for centuries, the people of Inakadate Village remarkably created some of the most famous Japan's art right from their paddy field!

From ground level, the artistic paddies spread out before the Inakadate Village office building are invisible like those corn circles that crop up in Western Countries. However, by scaling a 22-meter-high mock castle tower that's part of the village office and overlooks the fields, visitors are rewarded with a view that takes their breath away. And, as a boon to the local economy, it's a field of dreams as well, with around 150,000 visitors drawn to the village of 8,700 souls in the last few months alone.

In 1981, during some construction work for a new road, they dug up some rice paddies that archaeologists dated as being about 2,000 years old. Inakadate Villagers started to create rice-paddy art in 1993 as a local revitalization project. In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki in Aomori Prefecture every year, accompanied with the words "Inakadate, a village of rice culture." Then, by planting rice varieties with different colors of foliage on about 2,500 sq. meters of rice paddies, they quite literally brought their designs to life.

But as time went by, the locals' horizons widened and the pictures they tried to transform into fields of art became more and more complicated. Not surprisingly, over the years more and more people also began to pay attention to their extraordinary endeavors. Shown below is the transition from a bare field when they started planting on 27 May 2006, until the time the rice is ready to harvest in October.






This year, six staff of the Inakadate Village officials make an elaborate plan of how to plant different colors of rice to create the image. They calculate and plot the precise areas where each different color of rice needs to be planted in the paddies, and produce a printout of the design that at first just looks like a mass of dots.

When the project first started, they're using markers to determine where to plant each of the different rice varieties. Now they're using software to assist them to calculate the position of dots to draw the picture more precisely. For this year design, they use the image from the famous woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). They calculated the location of 6,100 dots for the Hokusai design, compared with 1,500 dots two years ago.

Then, on May 27 2007, a total of 700 people took part in the rice-planting event. They included 50 visitors from as far afield as Hokkaido, Kanagawa and Osaka alongside 450 from nearby towns and villages. Divided into teams, they used four kinds of rice. Two ancient varieties called ki ine (yellow rice) and murasaki ine (purple rice) that grow into yellow- and brown-leafed plants respectively, and also more modern Beni Miyako (Red Miyako) and Tsugaru Roman, an Aomori variety with a fresh-green color.

After that, the artworks were in the hands of nature as the seedlings began growing in varying hues into Hokusai's famous wave amid Inakadate Village's sea of swaying rice plants. There comes the time when this beautiful art has to be erase when it is harvested, but Inakadate Village officials will begin focusing to next year's artistic crop and host seminars at the request of other farming communities around Japan on the practical details of creating rice-paddy art.

Source : www.vill.inakadate.aomori.jp

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