This is just….really impressive. My dad forwarded me this email, and I had to share it here. Some rice farmers and villagers in Inkadate, Japan and other areas of the country took the time and effort to design these amazing works of art. As the information in the email described,

“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 color 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.”

Here’s a great time-lapse of the process of creating one of the remarkable pictures, from the initial stages to the finished product. You can see the image start to materialzie along the way.

It’s neat to see the process evolve over time, isn’t it?

Here are a few other awesome shots of some finished products.

Here’s one with Doraemon!

How is this all made? According to the e-mail,

This year, various artwork has popped up in other rice-farming areas of Japan , including designs of deer dancers. Smaller works of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers. 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 colored patterns in the time between planting and harvesting in September.

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

This is a picture of the grass up close, with the different-colored rice plants. The time that they must spend planting all of these plants at exactly the right times and places is just stunning. I can’t imagine doing something this meticulous and precise.

Further, the email says that

Closer to the image, the careful placement of the thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen.

Rice-paddy art was started there in 1993 as a local revitalization 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.

In 2005, agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art.

A year later, organizers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four differently colored rice varieties that bring the images to life.

It’s all so amazing and incredibly impressive, isn’t it?

Excuse me, I’m gonna go sit in the corner and be sad that I’m not as creative as the people who put all this magic together.

You can read more about the village of Inkadate and this art form as a whole at the village’s website.