S P O T ／ SPOT-063

Matsusaka Iinan Giant Straw Monuments

松阪飯南 稲わらモニュメントまつさかいいなん いなわらもにゅめんと

Every autumn in the Iinan district of Matsusaka, a local committee constructs a single enormous figure entirely out of rice straw — six meters tall, up to eleven meters wide, built around a wooden frame by volunteers in the weeks after the rice harvest. The subject changes each year: past installations have included a wild boar, an owl, a soaring dragon, a beckoning cat, and even a giant Amabie (the long-haired sea-creature folk-icon that became a pandemic-era mascot of disease protection); the 2024 figure was a phoenix. The monuments stand for a limited period — typically autumn through early winter — and then are dismantled and returned to the fields as compost, in keeping with the original logic of straw as agricultural byproduct. The committee that builds them, the Nigaki Revitalization Creative Executive Committee, treats the project as community development rather than tourism, and visitors are asked to approach with appropriate respect for what is, at its root, a local farming festival made visible at extraordinary scale.