Every summer, a tiny farming town in northern Japan hosts an art event that garners international acclaim for its impressive-scale and unusual medium. The village of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture is best known for its production of rice. Since 2003, artists in the village have used the plant ubiquitous to their culture as a means to grow designs into the earth, cultivated on one of the vast paddy fields.
The images are created with yellow and purple varieties of rice, together with an Aomori variety called Tsugaru Roman which is a vibrant green. Visitors arrive from all over the world to see the land art piece, which can be most easily and visibly seen from an observation deck, towering nearby the field’s expanse.
