Amazing Artwork

I was sent these images in an email from a friend and was so amazed I first checked them out and found similar reporting at The Daily Telegraph website (so it must be true!) and then had to share them.  Thanks Cyril for the email, this artwork is stunning.  Now I have to go to Japan in the summer to see the paddy field art as well as going in the spring to see the sakura blossom!!

Planting rice paddy fields in Japan.

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in  Japan ,

but this is no alien creation. 

The designs have been cleverly PLANTED!
Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye.

Instead, different colour rice plants

have been precisely and strategically arranged

and grown in the  paddy fields.
As summer progresses and the plants shoot up,

the detailed artwork begins to emerge.

 The farmers create the murals  

by planting little purple and yellow-leafed Kodaimai rice 

along with their local green-leafed Tsugaru, a Roman variety,

to create the coloured patterns

in the time between planting and harvesting in September.

 Rice-paddy art was started in 1993

as a local revitalisation project,

an idea that grew from meetings of the village committees.

The different varieties of rice plants

grow alongside each other to create the masterpieces.
In the first nine years,

the village office workers and local farmers

grew a simple design of  Mount Iwaki  every year.
But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention.

This photo was taken in  Inakadate ,  Japan . 

The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square metres of paddy fields. 

In 2005,

agreements between landowners

allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art.
A year later,

organizers used computers

to precisely plot the planting of four differently coloured rice varieties

that bring the images to life!

TRULY A WORK OF ART!!