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Okay, stick with me here, my Japanese isn’t that good so I am stealing my information from another site, but this was pretty cool so I wanted to post it.
Inakadate, Japan is the home to about 8,000 residents who have worked together since 1993 to produce intricate art in their rice field.
Each year they have a different theme for the fields and use different varieties of rice to create pictures of black, green and yellow. The images stretch over multiple fields and are planted to show their images at different times during the season.
This year the farmers are using the green phase of the rice cultivation to depict motifs of Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji.
You can see more of the pictures of the fields (and brush up on your Japanese) at their website (or at ;east a website devoted to their work) here.
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So, apparently in Japan they have found a way to package rice so that by adding cold water to a box, it produces seaming hot rice in 15 minutes. Currently the technology is being pushed for disaster situations, but I can already see commercial implications brewing in the developers mind. The article is “Japanese developers find way to create hot rice with cold water” from the Mainichi Daily News (cause I get my news from sources other then the NY Times).
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So, it was recently announced that everyone’s favorite rice icon, Uncle Ben, has a new title.
No longer is he just the face on the box, representing (according to Wikipedia) “… a domestic servant, in the Aunt Jemima tradition, or perhaps a Chicago maitre d’hotel, Frank Brown.” Uncle Ben is now the “Chairman” take a virtual tour of his new office at Uncle Ben’s website.
According to one of their Ad Execs, Howard Buford: “It’s potentially a very creative way to handle the baggage of old racial stereotypes as advertising icons,” but “it’s going to take a lot of work to get it right and make it ring true.”
Of course giving Uncle Ben a face lift and a new wardrobe might be a good place to start.
Uncle Ben’s Virtual Office is filled with both Rice and Uncle Ben propaganda interesting to check out if you’re into that sort of thing.