- Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in
Japan . But this is no alien creation - the designs have been cleverly
planted.
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- Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye.
Instead, different colours of rice plants have been precisely and strategically
arranged and grown in the paddy fields.
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- As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed
artwork begins to emerge.
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- A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from
hundreds of thousands of rice plants, the colours created by using different
varieties, in Inakadate in Japan
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- The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village
of Inakadate , 600 miles north of Toyko, where the tradition began in 1993.
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- 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.
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- More than 150,000 vistors come to Inakadate, where just
8,700 people live, every summer to see the extraordinary murals.
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- Each year hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant
four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy
fields.
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- Napolean on horseback can be seen from the skies, created
by precision planting and months of planning between villagers and farmers
in Inkadate
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- Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear
in fields in the town of Yonezawa , Japan
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- And over the past few years, other villages have joined
in with the plant designs.
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- Another famous rice paddy art venue is in the town of
Yonezawa in the Yamagata prefecture.
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- This year's design shows the fictional 16th-century samurai
warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen, whose lives feature in television
series Tenchijin.
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- Various artwork has popped up in other rice-farming areas
of Japan this year, including designs of deer dancers.
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- Smaller works of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming
areas of Japan such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Rice-paddy art was started there in 1993 as a local revitalization
project, an idea that grew out of meetings of the village committee.
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- Closer to the image, the careful placement of thousands
of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen
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- The different varieties of rice plant grow alongside
each other to create the masterpieces
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- In the first nine years, the village office workers and
local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki every year.
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- But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more
attention. In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed the creation of
enormous rice paddy art.
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- A year later, organisers used computers to precisely
plot planting of the four differently colored rice varieties that bring
the images to life.
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