Giant Straw Animals, Japan

Viral on Facebook are images of giant straw art. The images are definitely impressive, smack of a new and trendy culture, and are certainly worth a re-share. The following is a Bored Panda article entitles "Giant Straw Animals Invade Japanese Fields ... They Are Badass"

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 Rice straw was once widely used in Japan to produce various goods, such as tatami mats, but has now been replaced by wood and plastic in most instances.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 2008.

Featured are some of the best displays of the 2017 season:

The base of the structures are made from pipes and wooden sticks, and then the straw is added. One sculpture takes about a week to complete, and a lot of man power.

Another article entitled "Straw Dinosaurs in a Rice Field" and also published by Bored Panda in 2015, has more information regarding this new and trendy rice field activity.

What a way to end a season. Each year on the last day of August, Japan’s Niigata Prefecture celebrates the end of the rice harvest in a rather elaborate (yet resourceful) fashion: creating rice straw sculptures. 

Known as the Wara Art Festival, artists across the area transform the prefecture’s leftover wara (rice straw) into some truly stunning artwork, all available for public viewing.

Beyond pure artistic vision, each sculpture requires approximately one hundred bushels of straw, a team of workers and wooden frames, which serve as a “skeleton” for each sculpture. 

All of the subsequent works are impressive in their own right, but one artist in particular stands out: Amy Goda. Since 2013, the local sculptor’s massive dinosaur creations have captured the Internet’s attention, bringing the Wara festival fans from all around the world. 

Goda employs an array of techniques to create her straw statues, ranging from basket weaving to cottage thatching — even braiding. Whatever Goda’s process, her results are sturdy enough to allow festival goers to not just view her work, but fully interact with it. Festival patrons can pose on top of the giant effigies or stand underneath without fear of harm to themselves or Goda’s creations. 

From time to time, sculptors create variations that can float on water, like the giant duck featured at this year’s event. Reaching heights of up to 16 feet, the at the Wara Art Festival are truly a sight to behold. If your allergies or thin wallet prevent you from viewing the straw sculptures yourself, we’ve got you covered:

More info: Wara Art Festival (Japanese), Facebook