Hospitality for foreign tourists revitalizes the local area! "Sanmu Rice Field Art Project"

Through activities in collaboration with Sanmu City, Chiba Prefecture, the Faculty of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences will provide students with a variety of opportunities to think and learn about the issues facing the local community and put into practice ways to solve them.
As one of these efforts, we will continue to participate in the "Sanmu Rice Field Art Project 2017" (organized by Sanmu Rice Field Art PROJECT), as we did last year. This project has been held since 2015, and this year will be the third time. With the Tokyo Olympics approaching in 2020, many tourists from overseas are expected to visit Japan. In the skies above Sanmu City, close to Narita Airport, the gateway to the country, we will be painting in rice fields in the hope that the rice art that spreads outside the airplane window will become a memory of the trip.

The aim is for people to transcend the barriers of generation and nationality, come together to experience rice planting and harvesting, and interact through food and art. Students from Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences will deepen their understanding of the use of rice paddy art, a method that can be used as a trump card for revitalizing the region, to promote interaction between urban and regional people and utilize regional resources as an effort to solve regional issues such as the decline of the region due to a declining birthrate and aging population.

The theme of this year's rice field art is "Rolling rice balls." The event "Starting rice planting," where students plant colorful seedlings according to a design drawing, will be held on Saturday, May 20th, with about 60 students from Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences participating.
*The harvest event that will conclude the project, "Iroiro Rice Harvesting," is scheduled for Saturday, September 30th.

Sanmu Rice Field Art Project 2017 "Starting Rice Planting"