The 59th Sapporo Snow Festival – February 5 to 11, 2008 travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises, spa and resorts

Deep in the Hokkaido winter, for 7 days in mid February every year, hundreds of snow statues and ice sculptures line the streets of Sapporo City. The Sapporo Snow Festival now attracts more than 2 million people every year to Hokkaido making it one of the biggest events of Japan‘s festival calendar. The festival is best known for the ice sculpture competition attracting artists from around the world, competing to create the largest and most elaborate artworks from ice and snow. For these seven days in February, these statues and sculptures turn Sapporo into a winter dreamland of crystal-like ice and white snow.

The Snow Festival began in 1950, when local high school students built six snow statues in Odori Park along the city’s main street. The sculptures attracted an unexpected amount of attention and gradually it became a custom for the people of Sapporo to build sculptures there every year. The main site is the Odori Site in Sapporo’s centrally located 1.5 kilometer long Odori Park. The festival’s famous large snow sculptures, some more than 15 meters tall and 25 meters wide, are exhibited there. They are lit up daily until 22:00.

The cavalcades of international visitors come to watch the city morph into an Opaline dreamworld and marvel as the streets become a kabuki-style Disneyland of glittering monsters and ice-maidens, gods and demons, palaces and pyramids. The main boulevard is spangled with hundreds of statues, some as large as houses and over the years the festival has showcased frosted versions of the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Pyramids of Egypt.
It is very cold in Sapporo in February, so you need to dress warm when going to see the festival. You should wear thermal underwear and a sweater and then an overcoat like a ski jacket. Also, you should bring a hat or ear-warmer and gloves.