Tambo Art-incredible paintings in the rice fields of Japan

If the origin of crop circles is still a mystery to scientists, then there is a reasonable explanation for the bright drawings on the land areas of Japan. This is the work of talented farmers who know how to create real masterpieces with the help of selection.

Every year, Japanese farmers sow up to 12 varieties of rice in one field with a specific goal – to create living canvases that take your breath away.

Rice shoots of different shades grow so that gradually images of national heroes and cartoon characters appear on the field. This kind of art is called tambo.

For almost two thousand years, the inhabitants of the village of Inakadate have been growing rice, but the tradition of sowing cereals in an "artistic" way was born here not so long ago – in 1993. 

Then the peasants decided, using different varieties of rice, to "draw" some simple picture on the field. The experiment was a success, and since then, every year in April, the villagers gather to determine which masterpiece of painting will be displayed on their fields in six months.

When they have decided on the picture, the peasants mark the selected field accordingly (with an area of about 15 thousand square meters) and manually begin to sow it with different varieties of rice. The field is huge, the work is painstaking, the peasants spend their days knee-deep in water-these are the features of rice sowing – but it is done very carefully.

In recent years, the villagers have even experienced some inconveniences from their creativity. The fact is that Inakadate is a small village by local standards, only nine thousand people of the population, the infrastructure here is appropriate. And when up to two hundred thousand tourists come here in the fall to admire an extraordinary and short-lived work of art, there is simply nowhere to place them.

However, now it is not only in Inakadat that they create picture fields. Other villages began to compete with each other for the honorary title of "the most artistic village in Japan". Somewhere they create paintings based on their native Japanese culture, somewhere they take Western culture as a model.

But in both cases, artistically sown fields change in shades with the ripening of rice and in autumn they are real masterpieces. And when it comes time to harvest, the rice grown in the picture field, after processing, goes to the most ordinary stores.