This is one of those bizarrely creative things that I'd only expect to see come out of Japan. In the early '90s, the country village of Inakadate watched as their population continued moving to the cities, and the local council began brainstorming ways to turn the village into a tourist destination.

The idea they cooked up was to plant differently-colored rice in such a way that it created an image in the paddy. Their first effort, in 1993, used two different colors and wasn't terribly promising:

Enter a caption (optional)

Few people showed up. Next they tried something artsier, the Mona Lisa:

Enter a caption (optional)

People criticized the perspective. Atsushi Yamamoto, the local school's art teach who had been tasked with creating the images, told the BBC that

"At the beginning when I started rice paddy art, there were some failures, but after some trial and error, I gained experience, and now, the rice paddy art comes out the way it's envisioned."

They kept at it, introducing more colors of rice over the years (now up to seven) and producing more complicated images. Take a look at what they can do now:

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

Note that they've learned to skew the images so that they appear proper when observed from the nearby observation platform:

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

This Tanbo ("rice paddy") art now draws nearly 350,000 visitors a year.

Here's a closer look at the painstaking process of how they do it: