81-year-old Japanese farmer turns rice paddies into giant living art

In Nasushiobara, a town in Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture, 81-year-old rice paddy artist Tokio Nakano leads his family in planting rice varieties that grow into enormous living artworks across their fields, according to SoraNews24.

Nakano’s process involves four stages: sketching a blueprint based on the field’s size and viewing angle, selecting from eight rice varieties with different leaf colours and growth speeds, projecting the design onto the field at night to mark planting zones by hand, and finally having the whole family plant each seedling individually — a slow, physically demanding process.

The Nakano family has spent sixteen years transforming their paddies into public art, partly to help visitors “discover the charm of the northern Kanto region,” an area north of Tokyo that doesn’t always draw tourist attention.

This year’s main artwork, which opened to the public on 18 June, honours local singer Rie Utagokoro and Chika Ozeki, the real Meiji-era woman who inspired the nurse lead in NHK’s morning drama “Kaze, Kaoru.” A second art site, featuring comedian duos Ujikoji and Kaminari, debuted on 1 July for the first time in the project’s history.

Although the rice is harvested at the end of September, a second crop grows in afterward, meaning visitors can view the artwork until the season’s first frost.