In Japan’s Niigata prefecture, cooler weather marks the advent of enormous straw creatures materializing from the fields and stalking the changing landscape. Every year around the rice harvest, art students repurpose the crop’s leftover straw, or wara, into mammoth characters for the Wara Art Festival. Recent editions have brought dragons, a bonsai-like tree, and the widely popular maneki-neko, or beckoning cat, to the autumn terrain.
On view now at Uwasekigata Park, this year’s festival is themed Echigo no Umi, or Sea of Echigo. More
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Gargantuan Straw Creatures Rise from the Fields of Japan’s Annual Rice Harvest
