Inakadate Rice Paddy Art

In 1993 the village of Inakadate, looking for something to do about a declining population, planted a small design in a paddy using rice varieties with different coloured leaves. Three decades later it is a village-wide operation using a dozen or more strains of rice in purple, yellow, white, orange and several greens, plotted by computer and planted by hand by hundreds of volunteers, producing images of astonishing tonal complexity across an entire field.

This is where the practice began, and the work here remains the most technically ambitious in Japan. It only reads from height, so the village office and a second site each have an observation tower. The rice is real and is harvested. The design changes every year, is unveiled in late May, and is at its most vivid from August as the plants fill in — after which it is cut and the field goes back to being a field.