Wara Straw Art
Northern Japan is known for its wealth of rice paddies. After the rice is harvested each autumn and the grain extracted, a huge amount of rice straw is left over, called wara. Instead of going to waste, the wara is reused in many ways: for roofs, fertilizer, livestock feed, and, historically, to make various goods before it was replaced by more modern materials
Niigata is a port city on Honshu, Japan’s main island where the Wara Art Festival has been taking place since 2008. It began as a creative collaboration between the city’s tourism division and the Musashino Art University. 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
The first link shows some of the amazing sculptures that have been created
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drjRrwWAxSw
The second link is a time last video to show how these creations are made
