Speaking of things you just don't see at home in Canada, here are some pictures from the Scarecrow Festival held in the town next to ours last month. 

After all of the rice is all harvested, there tends to be a lot of straw lying around.  Great way to use some of it up is to make a scarecrow.  This festival is actually a competition with different age classes and categories for contestants to compete their scarecrow in.  As you can tell from the pictures there are all types of scarecrows, all with some kind of Japanese flair.  The guy on the top left is actually doing a real scarecrow job in right now after being placed in the middle of a field not far from our apartment.  Considering the guy is about 10 feet tall, I am sure he does more than just scare crows away.

One of my favourite scarecrows at the event was this pink guy on the left.  His name is Momo Taro (Peach Boy) from a Japanese children's story.  Have a close look and you can see that great pains went into making sure that Momo Taro is anatomically correct.  Actually, by the end of the day his "anatomically correct" part was all dirty because little kids kept coming up and grabbing it and yanking on it.  Poor guy. 

I gave the scarecrow on the bottom right the "Best use for an old Michael J Fox shirt" award.  Funny how things from home creep into my everyday life here.  We were at the races yesterday and they were playing Nikelback over the PA system. 

Other scarecrows in attendance included ET, various Pocket Monsters, and lots of samurai looking guys.