NEARLY two decades ago, Koichi Hanada, a town hall clerk, received an unusual request from his boss: find a way to bring tourists to the village of Inakadate in Japan's rural north, an area of rice paddies and apple orchards.
Hanada spent months racking his brain. Then, one day he saw schoolchildren planting a rice paddy as a class project. They used two varieties of rice, one with dark purplish stalks and the other bright green ones. Then it struck him, why not plant the
coloured varieties to form words and pictures?
"I didn't know it would become such a hit," he said.
The result was paddy art, a concept that has put the village on the map. Every year since 1993, villagers have created pictures using rice paddies as their canvas and living plants as their paints.
As their creations have grown larger, more complex and multicoloured, they have drawn growing media attention and curious crowds.
Last year, more than 170,000 visitors clogged the narrow streets of this quiet community of 8,450 mostly older residents, causing traffic jams and waiting hours to see living art.
To create this year's football field-size picture of a samurai battling a warrior monk, villagers used a computer model to place more than 8,000 stakes to guide them in planting rice genetically engineered to produce three more colours: dark red, yellow and white.
The images have become so detailed, mayor Koyu Suzuki said visitors ask if they are painted on. He said the villagers believed they must produce ever more intricate pictures to keep tourists coming back.
"We have no sea and no mountains, but what we do have plenty of is rice," said Suzuki, 70. "We have to create a tourism industry using our own ingenuity."
Residents of Inakadate hope the paddy art will reverse their village's decline. Like much of rural Japan, Inakadate has fallen on hard times from a shrinking population, a crushing public debt and falling prices for agricultural goods.
"So many things have gone wrong, but the paddy art lets the community feel together again," said Kumiko Kudo, 73, who runs a noodle bar.
But so far, the village has failed to turn its accomplishments on the paddies to its financial benefit. The visitors who now flood in during the summer growing season, when the rice stalks grow tall enough for the pictures to become visible, do not splash out.
"Tourists come, say how wonderful it is and then just leave," said Katsuaki Fukushi, the town hall economic chief.
Before the paddy art, the village's only claim to fame was the discovery in 1981 of the remains of 2,000-year-old rice paddies, making it one of the oldest rice-growing regions in Japan's sparsely populated north.
