A lot of what you see as a tourist in Japan is profound or subtle or simply puzzling, but these rice-paddy artworks in Inakadate were just fun. Each is roughly football-field-sized and you go up in a tower to view them. Here (I’m told) are two famous Japanese TV characters:
And Gojira! (Mebbe two football fields? Possible Mothra at left.)
From a prior year, here’s your gender studies curriculum all wrapped up in one image:
Also, finally, from a prior year:
I also gotta admire these as a successful rural tourism effort. In my prior career doing microenterprise, people talked a lot about revitalizing rural economies by creating a tourism “hook.” It’s hard to do! But Inakadate seems to have nailed it, with 200,000 visitors annually. (When we showed up at around 9:00 a.m., there were already busloads of people on line.) They also, after the tourist season is over, just harvest and sell the rice–in the tourist shops, at least, at a premium.
Nicely done, Inakadate.
PS – Buzzfeed’s got a nice gallery.
PPS – Bon voyage Walter!
bmoak
Do you know how they did this?
raven
@bmoak:
raven
@bmoak: Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan.
Hillary Rettig
@bmoak: one image I couldn’t find online was the nifty forced-perspective (I think it’s called) sketches they work from to make sure that the image appears correctly from the five-story tower. And they’re obviously getting great artistic support in terms of translating the images to the available color palette.
Other than those, I think it’s mostly sheer rice-based know-how. It’s a great example of leveraging one’s strengths and core competences.
raven
@Hillary Rettig: There is an article on the wiki page at the bottom of your link.
Mnemosyne
I’m guessing they got a nice subsidy from the Walt Disney Company (Japan) for the “Star Wars” one.
Hillary Rettig
@raven: thx!
Amir Khalid
Cool. I’ve never seen anything remotely like this in a padi field here. (In Malay, padi is tthe rice plant, the harvested grain that you buy in the supermarket is beras, and the cooked rice on your plate is nasi.)
Hillary Rettig
@Mnemosyne: commercial content and subsidies have been a source of controversy, apparently
raven
@Amir Khalid: The paddies I saw in asia didn’t look like that either, I wonder if the smell the same?
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
Malay must be an extremely precise language.
Betty Cracker
Very cool field art!
We’re about to get a big storm where I am. It’s as dark as dusk when it should be broad daylight, and I can already hear the thunder.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne: More like rice is that important.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
This is impressive. We’re lucky we even get around to mowing the half of our property that isn’t just red dirt and rocks.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
And the coconut rice that has all disappeared from your plate was nasi lemak.
Hillary Rettig
@Betty Cracker: Maybe grow rice? ;-)
I actually used to love Florida afternoon thunderstorms when I visited my parents – but then again didn’t have to live with them for more than a couple of weeks. Stay dry!
Hillary Rettig
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA: I must say that when I read your fun comment I initially thought you were Baud, and can offer no higher praise. :-)
ShadeTail
OK, seriously, it’s months later and the “Read more” links still don’t work right. When are they finally going to start taking you below the fold instead of to the top of the article?
Bill_D
Reminds me of the times I’ve seen rice fields referred to as “rice patties”.
Mnemosyne
@Hillary Rettig:
You do sometimes get to a weird intersection — when you use that famous image of Marilyn Monroe, is that advertising or art? And you want a balance so it’s not just acres of ads, but I can see why Godzilla and Star Wars would be both commercially sponsored and something that would attract tourists.
? Martin
Very impressive. And good comments on how difficult it is for new economic models to develop in rural areas. As much as we’d like to see West Virginian coal miners successfully move onto new careers, finding an economic plan that can hold a rural mountain community together is incredibly difficult. When a town exists for a specific geographical reason and that reason goes away, can the town even be saved? It is a better economic outcome to simply buy them out and encourage them to move on? This is a big component of why Chinese industry can move so rapidly – they have very little permanence. Temporary housing, no permanent property rights, etc. We are very sentimental about heritage and location, perhaps to our detriment sometimes.
Anoniminous
Speaking as a New Mexican, living in New Mexico a state that depends on tourism, depending on tourism is dumb.
Truegster
If it’s supposed to be Toshiro Mifune on the right, then he looks too gaunt and if it’s not, then it should to be Toshiro Mifune.
SiubhanDuinne
@ShadeTail:
Works fine for me.
trollhattan
@Anoniminous:
Areas that do so, at least in the US West typically are trying to recover from the inevitable bust of one or more extraction industries, basically trying to sustain an unsustainable population. Tricky, at best.
Iowa Old Lady
@Anoniminous: That’s not a temptation to which Iowa is likely to succumb.
trollhattan
@Iowa Old Lady:
The lure of Okoboji cannot be denied!
Anoniminous
@Iowa Old Lady:
Tourism would interfere with the corn, beans, and Florida rotation.
@trollhattan:
Depending on mining and other resource extraction industries are even worse than tourism. First they rip the countryside to hell and gone, then they poison the water sources, and then they declare bankruptcy and leave the state to pay for cleaning up the mess.
trollhattan
@Anoniminous:
Dead on. Mining is especially bad, and long-lived. We’re trying to deal with 150 YO mercury from California’s gold fields, which is very persistent and bioaccumulàtes in sport fish. Grazing and timber aren’t practiced sustainably either.
eclare
Fourth quadrant, things I didn’t even know that I didn’t know. Thanks!