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In the coldest month of the year, the hottest ticket in Japan, and maybe the whole world, is for the Sapporo Snow holiday on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.  More than two million visitors from around the world descend on.  Hokkaido’s capital to watch it changed into the glistening, glittering, and glistening sector 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 outlined everything from ancient Eastern 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 grouping 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 strategy for building the gigantic snow sculptures typical of the Snow holiday today. 

The Snow festival Venues
Makomanai Base is now one of the three main venues for the festival, and is the location of the biggest sculptures ; the third site, where the ice carving competition is held, is in Sapporo’s Susukino district.  During the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, the Snow festival gained global commend, and the Snow Statue Competition started two years later. 

The Snow holiday 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 reservations for the Snow holiday should be made at least six months ahead. 

hostels near the Snow festival
The Korakuen Hotel Sapporo offers four-star accommodations handy to all of Sapporo’s parks and beautiful 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 Nijo Castle Japan.