The Ice Cold Snow Festival In Japan

e coldest month of the year, the hottest ticket inFive years later, the Japan Self-Defense Forces
Japan, and maybe the entire world, is for thehoused at Makomanai base introduced, as a training
Sapporo Snow festival on Japan’sexercise, the technique for building the enormous
northernmost island of Hokkaido. More than twosnow sculptures typical of the Snow Festival today.
million visitors from around the world descend on.The Snow Festival Venues
Hokkaido’s capital to watch it transformedMakomanai Base is now one of the three main
into the glistening, glittering, and gleaming world of avenues for the Festival, and is the site of the biggest
frozen fairyland.sculptures; the third site, where the ice carving
For a week each February, the skyscrapers ofcompetition is held, is in Sapporo’s Susukino
Sapporo become upstaged by edifices and statuesdistrict. During the 1972 Winter Olympic Games in
of frozen snow forming a second city in Odori ParkSapporo, the Snow Festival gained international
and the streets at their feet. Ice sculptures of theacclaim, and the Snow Statue Competition began
past have depicted everything from ancient Japanesetwo years later.
temples, samurais, and dragons to contemporaryThe Snow Festival is truly a community effort, with
athletes, ice maidens, political figures, and fifty-footcitizen’s groups both creating ice sculptures
high dinosaurs.and assisting tourists, especially the disabled. They
The current Snow Festival is the descendant of aalso provide tourist information and act as
much smaller 1950 festival, the effort of a group ofinterpreters for the flood of foreign guests. Hotel
Sapporo high school students who built six snowreservations for the Snow Festival should be made
statues in Odori Park and so impressed theat least six months in advance.
park’s visitors that the tradition continued.