Inakadate, a nondescript village of around 7,000 people, located in Japan’s Aomori prefecture is considered the home of a rice field art form more elaborate than anywhere else in the world.
The story of Inakadate village as a world-renowned tourist destination began in the early 1990s, when local authorities realized that youths were moving to large urban centers in droves, and started brainstorming for ways of breathing new life into the village. One of the proposed ideas was an art form inspired by the local’s traditional rice cultivation, done by hand for hundreds of years. Called Tanbo Art (rice field art), it involved the use of different-color rice varieties to turn local rice fields into giant canvases for intricate designs that revealed their beauty when viewed from above.
