It was a modest success, with a clear design and a few spectators. According to Sasaki, a few hundred villagers planted a simple triangular shape to represent Mt. Atsushi Yamamoto, a former high-school art teacher, plans the designs with the aid of a computer program. “The person in charge at town hall saw this and wondered if rice could be planted with words and pictures,” says Suzuki. After all, she adds, “It’s calm and there are no mudslides, it’s quite livable.”Īt the time, elementary-school students were planting heirloom purple and yellow rice, and green everyday rice, in a striped pattern. “If there’s something that differentiates us, that we can say, ‘this is Inakadate,’ then the population might increase,” says Sasaki.
How could they revitalize the village? They looked around at what they had: rice, which has been cultivated here for at least 2,000 years and stretches as far as the eye can see. This demographic crisis, coupled with the village’s mounting debt, prompted administrators to get creative. There aren’t any children in the neighborhood, except for an occasional middle schooler.” This year’s scene and the observation deck. Of those who remain, “There are a lot of people who aren’t getting married,” says Sasaki, with a pointed look at Suzuki. Inakadate has fewer than 8,000 residents, mostly farming families whose younger members leave to find work in cities. “My rice field used to be worked by my husband, but he passed away and now I’m working it,” says rice farmer Hisako Sasaki. Like much of rural Japan, Inakadate has a shrinking population. But now we’re standing at the edge of an emerald green swath, the product of countless hours of labor, unrolling across the landscape to Mt. Here, in the village of Inakadate, there is wind and rain, clouds and mountains, owls in the forest and frog song in the rice paddies. “This was a rice farming area with no tourism and nothing to see.” Villagers plant rice at one of the sites. “Before rice paddy art?” asks Fumihito Suzuki, who works at the local tourism department. This year, it’s a scene from Itomichi, a locally made film about a girl who plays the Tsugaru shamisen, a popular, three-stringed folk instrument.
I’m standing in a lush, midsummer rice paddy, but the intelligent design of these colorful crops becomes apparent only when I ascend the nearby observation tower.īack in the spring, hundreds of volunteers meticulously planted these shoots to create, over a period of several months, a huge living canvas on which a painting materializes. Stalks of green, yellow, creamy white, pale red, and deep purple bend gently in the breeze.
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