The Wara Art Festival is held each year on the spacious grounds of Uwasekigata Park in Northern Japan. This happens between late August and the end of October. This art festival started more than 13 years ago, in 2008. After harvesting, lots of rice straw is remaining. Students of Musashino Art University in Tokyo create beautiful sculptures from the rice straw of this festival. You can feel it as gigantic animals attacking Japanese fields after the rice harvest.
In this festival, they create lovely straw sculptures of gorillas, dinosaurs, crabs, lions, crocodiles, and many other animals. Besides Musashino Art University students, local volunteers also participated in creating these mind-blowing sculptures. In 2018 they celebrated their 10th anniversary of this festival. The students and volunteers make giant wooden frame skeletons for this festival. After creating frames, they add individual layers of Wara to them. As this is a big challenge to create these big sculptures, they take over two weeks to complete the sculptures. They use different techniques to create these sculptures.
Many tourists and locals come to Uwasekigata park to participate in this Wara art festival to see gigantic animals attacking Japanese fields after the rice harvest. They take photographs of Wara sculptures. Some sculptures are giant and up to 5m tall. Usually, traditional Japanese use Wara for roofing in houses, woven into shoes, and sometimes as a blanket. But in this festival, they create sculptures using Wara. You can usually watch straw arts from morning to evening. You can enter the Wara art festival premises for free.
If you hope to visit the Wara art festival, it is easy for you to rent a car from Niigata city to Uwasekigata park. It will take 20 minutes. You can also take a train from Niigata to Maki station and then take a bus ride to Uwasekigata park.
Hear are some of the mesmerizing creations.Check out them.
It is a mind-blowing experience to see these gigantic animals attacking Japanese fields after the rice harvest. This sounds more interesting for kids also. You can take marvelous photos there. So, don’t miss the next opportunity if you can manage to get there.
For more information you can check them on Facebook or over on their website.
Image credits: Wara Art Festival
