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 modified into the lustrous, glittering, and shining world of an ice-cold fairyland.
For a week each Feb, the skyscrapers of Sapporo become upstaged by edifices and statues of frozen snow forming a second town in Odori Park and the streets at their feet. Ice sculptures of the past have depicted everything from ancient japanese temples, samurais, and dragons to recent athletes, ice maidens, political figures, and fifty-foot high dinosaurs.
The current Snow Festival is the descendant of a way smaller 1950 festival, the effort of a bunch of Sapporo highschool students who built 6 snow statues in Odori Park and so impressed the park’s visitors the tradition continued. 5 years later, the Japan Self-Defense Forces housed at Makomanai base introduced, as a training exercise, the technique for building the enormous snow sculptures characteristic of the Snow festival today.
The Snow festival Venues
Makomanai Base is now one of the 3 main venues for the festival, and is the site of the largest sculptures ; the 3rd site, where the ice carving competition is held, is in Sapporo’s Susukino district. In the 1972 Winter olympic games in Sapporo, the Snow holiday gained international acclaim, and the Snow Statue Competition commenced two years on.
The Snow holiday is truly a community effort, with voter’s groups both making ice sculptures and assisting tourists, particularly the disabled. They also provide holiday maker info and act as interpreters for the flood of foreign guests. Hotel reservations for the Snow festival should be made at least six months ahead.
hostels near the Snow festival
The Korakuen Hotel Sapporo offers four-star accommodations convenient to all of Sapporo’s parks and scenic areas, and is ideally situated for commercial travelers.
Thinking about traveling outside of the country? Famouswonders.com can help you decide where to go on your next vacation, or you can view Nintoku Mausoleum.
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