Video: Space for creativity: giant drawings in Japan's rice fields
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Coming soon rice fields of japan planting will begin, and in the fall, some of them will turn into giant images of national heroes and Western pop icons. The authors of these incredible drawings are not ambitious contemporary artists, but the most ordinary farmers.
"Artistic" rice planting is a relatively young art, it appeared in 1993 and the place of its origin is considered to be a small village called Inakadate … Rice has been cultivated here for more than two thousand years, and the population kept the agronomic traditions of antiquity with all diligence, but with the advent of modernity for Inakadate these are not the easiest times. Thanks to the drawings in the rice fields, the place with a population of nine thousand people has turned into a real attraction, which is visited by about 200 thousand tourists annually.
The variants of the drawings that are supposed to be placed in the fields are discussed by the residents in April, and about 15 thousand square meters of land are usually allocated for one image. Rice planting begins in May. It should be noted that this is a very time-consuming process: farmers perform all the work while standing knee-deep in water. In September, the villagers present their works to the public. It is not always possible to understand how the workers managed to transfer the drawing to a huge field, observing the proportions and not getting entangled in the numerous sprouts of white, light green and black rice.
Impressed by the pictures in the margins Inakadate farmers from other Japanese villages created their works in this "genre". Thus began the exciting race for the title of "Japan's most artistic village". If some villages give preference to the classics of Japanese painting and create grandiose reproductions of works Hokusai and Utamarowhile others are clearly guided by Western culture.
All the crops harvested from these fields go on sale to the most ordinary shops. Therefore, it is likely that the rice from which the sushi so beloved by many is prepared was once part of a folk artwork.
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