Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in 2012, highlighting an artistic fashion project designed to raise awareness about the agricultural rehabilitation of Fukushima following the 2011 nuclear disaster.
A Japanese shoe designer developed “Healing Fukushima (Nanohana Heels)”, a unique pair of mechanical shoes that automatically plant seeds in the ground as the wearer walks in them. The remarkable shoes are part of an artistic project designed to help rebuild Fukushima.
Imaginative Footwear Design
Designer Masaya Kushino’s highly imaginative shoes usually sport wild, Dada-esque heels. He’s famously adorned them with animal horns, fake ponytails, colourful peacock feathers, and ornate gold framing. So it genuinely was not a big stretch for him to creatively add a mechanical component for distributing seeds into the earth.
“Healing Fukushima (Nanohana Heels)” was deeply conceptualised in close partnership with Japanese artist-designer Sputniko, who originally came up with the inspiring project idea.
Rebuilding Fukushima
Fukushima remains tragically contaminated with dangerous nuclear waste following the massive earthquake and devastating tsunami that violently struck the power plant there early last year. Sputniko visited temporary housing sites there a number of times and learned about ongoing efforts to plant vast fields of rapeseed in the affected region.
Experiments by Belarusian scientists have conclusively shown that some specific varieties of rapeseed, known colloquially in Japan as “nanohana”, actively absorb dangerous radioactive substances such as Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 directly from the contaminated soil.
These radionucleotides are safely stored in the blossoms’ long stalks and seed coats, but completely avoid the seeds themselves—which is incredibly fortunate because the seeds can then be successfully turned into Canola oil, the most popular source for creating bio-diesel.
Planting Seeds With Every Step
This amazing discovery led, in the 2000s, to the mass planting of rapeseeds by the Ukraine and Belarus governments across over 50,000 hectares of Chernobyl-affected land, in a bold move to revive the area’s agriculture industry which had been entirely wiped out by the tragic 1986 nuclear accident.
In the highly complex mechanical heels, simple downward pressure from the walking movement effectively causes a small tube within the heel to quickly emerge. The compartment containing rapeseeds mechanically turns and, very similar to a BB gun mechanism, a single tiny seed forcefully emerges from the end of the tube. Lifting the foot easily resets and starts the entire process again.
Despite their apparent mechanical functionality, the towering, beautiful work of art is primarily intended to act as a powerful catalyst for urgent discussion about completely rebuilding Fukushima, rather than serving as a practical, everyday farming tool.
