In the coldest month of the year, the hottest ticket in Japan, and maybe the entire world, is for the Sapporo Snow festival on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.  More than two million visitors from around the world descend on.  Hokkaido’s capital to watch it transformed into the glistening, glittering, and glistening arena of an ice-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 ancient jap temples, samurais, and dragons to up to date 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 high school students who built six snow statues in Odori Park and so impressed the park’s visitors the custom continued.  Five years after, 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 holiday Venues
Makomanai Base is now one of the 3 main venues for the holiday, 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 olympic games in Sapporo, the Snow holiday gained world acclaim, and the Snow Statue Competition commenced 2 years later. 

The Snow festival is truly a community effort, with citizen’s groups both creating ice sculptures and helping tourists, particularly the disabled.  They also provide tourist information and act as interpreters for the flood of foreign guests.  Hotel room bookings for the Snow festival should be made at least 6 months in advance. 

hotels close to the Snow holiday
The Korakuen Hotel Sapporo offers four-star accommodations convenient to all of Sapporo’s parks and lovely areas, and is ideally situated for commercial travelers.

How would you like to see the top 100 wonders in the world? Visit famouswonders.com and browse through the top destinations in the world and be sure to check out Osaka Castle Japan.