Fall is a season of harvesting, and
festivals to celebrate it are currently taking place all over the
world. In Northern Japan, the Wara Art Festival recently rang in
the September-October rice season, and it’s a wildly inventive and
fun way to repurpose rice straw left over from the harvest.
Wara Art Festival has been taking
place in Niigata City since 2008, where it began as a creative
collaboration between the city’s tourism division and the Musashino
Art University. Rice straw was once widely used in Japan to produce
various goods, such as tatami mats, but has now been replaced by
wood and plastic in most instances. The students of Musashino
worked together to fill the fields of Niigata with giant animal
sculptures made of bound rice straw, and they’ve been doing it
every year since then.
Check out the best displays from
the 2017 festival below, and definitely put a trip to Japan on your
fall to-do list for next year.
