Artist Mitsuaki Tanabe is stubborn.

In the past 20 years, he has been creating sculptures themed on a single motif: a grain of rice.

But the rice that Tanabe selects to sculpt is not the common-or-garden sort that people normally stuff themselves with. Oh no, it is the "mother of all rice" — the wild variety that's the ancestor of today's cultivated rice, and which is believed to have been sprouting on this planet for no less than 10,000 years.