Japanese farmers are creating dazzling displays in rice fields – but how do they do it?
The digital age meets the stone age in these pictures “painted” with different coloured crops in Japanese rice fields. Making giant pictures on the earth is an ancient art form. The Nazca people in pre-conquest Peru long ago created vast drawings of animals, geometrical shapes and lines, which some have refused to credit them with, and instead attribute to alien visitors. Other archaic designs that turn the earth into a picture surface include chalk figures engraved in British hillsides and the Great Serpent Mound made by native Americans in Ohio. Japan’s lovely new contribution to this ancient art is, however, unimaginable without modern technology.
I don’t mean that the farmers of the village of Inakadate where the rice pictures started in 1993 – they are now spreading through Japan – have somehow cheated. The images are created by laborious handicraft: kodaimai rice, which has purple and yellow leaves, is planted among green-leaved tsugaru roman rice to create the patterns. This takes loving care and it’s a real triumph of folk art, but computer imaging is used to work out how to plant such complex designs.
The reason ancient images engraved in deserts strike some people as being completely beyond the powers of “primitive” artists is not that it’s hard to draw a bird, say, but that it’s hard to survey the ground accurately enough to map your bird on a large scale on the ground. It makes us imagine they had help from above. In reality, the creators of the Nazca lines or Britain’s stone circles were simply brilliant at maths. But no one could ever calculate the precise pictures these Japanese farmers have planted without the aid of technology…
More images here (Thanks Kirsty)
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Wow! That is actually amazing! I think farmers should start doing that here!
What’s the words beneath say? Cooking instructions!
I can barely remember the hiragana script. My good script is katakana. I can’t quite translate it much though because it’s been cut off and I need every character to deduce the words
…Chinese speaking Aliens?…am confused
We did that already way longer .. with flowers … Duh..
And that all for the few pilots that come flying by? Who you dont even know? The rice field I mean (if it is true that is, you have to say that nowadays all the time before getting into the story .. )
I prefer grain circles … or .. erm ..fiant body parts on roofs …
My parakeets were very obsessed with seeing their mates down there when they for the first time went on the roof of their bird cage ..
Next thing … painting in the sky … (which has been done already as well .. sort of ..)
Those Japanese crop circles are so much more impressive than ours
That’s no crop circle, since a crop circle relies on the bending and flattening the grain stems, and remains fairly low tech to survey the area and to create the circle.
The approach to planted designs is probably far more difficult, since it takes longer to determine whether any major mistake was made at the planting stage.
However there are other examples that weren’t mentioned. In the late 1930′s Nazi operations were carried out throughout a couple of large forests in Germany whereby trees were removed and then replaced with darker leafed shrubs in Giant swastika designs.