In the coldest month of the year, the most up to date ticket in Japan, and maybe the world, is for the Sapporo Snow festival on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. More than two million visitors from all over the world descend on. Hokkaido’s capital to watch it transformed into the lustrous, glittering, and shining world of a cold fairyland.
For a week each February, the skyscrapers of Sapporo become upstaged by edifices and statues of frozen snow forming a second city in Odori Park and the streets at their feet. Ice sculptures of the past have outlined everything from traditional japanese temples, samurais, and dragons to recent athletes, ice maidens, political figures, and fifty-foot high dinosaurs.
the prevailing Snow Festival is the descendant of a much smaller 1950 festival, the effort of a group of Sapporo highschool scholars who built 6 snow statues in Odori Park and so impressed the park’s visitors that the tradition continued. 5 years later, the Japan Self-Defense Forces housed at Makomanai base introduced, as a training exercise, the method for building the gigantic snow sculptures characteristic of the Snow festival today.
The Snow festival Venues
Makomanai Base is now one of the three main venues for the festival, and is the site of the most important sculptures ; the 3rd site, where the ice carving competition is held, is in Sapporo’s Susukino district. In the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, the Snow holiday gained international commend, and the Snow Statue Competition commenced 2 years later.
The Snow festival is truly a community effort, with voter’s groups both creating ice sculptures and assisting tourists, especially the disabled. They also provide holiday maker info and act as interpreters for the flood of foreign guests. Hotel room bookings for the Snow holiday should be made at least 6 months ahead.
hostels close to the Snow festival
The Korakuen Hotel Sapporo offers four-star accommodations convenient to all of Sapporo’s parks and beautiful areas, and is ideally situated for commercial travelers.
How many wonders have you visit during your lifetime? Visit famouswonders.com and see the top wonders of the world and also have a look at Nishi Honganji Temple.
Tags: Festival, Ice cold snow, Japan, Sapporo
