Best in snow

In Sapporo’s Odori Park, the wind is howling, the temperature is minus 7c and snow is blowing horizontally. The competitors preparing their intricate sculptures for the city’s annual week-long snow festival, held every February, couldn’t be happier – the 78 teams of amateur snow sculptors know that warmth is the enemy. Since 1965, this section of the competition has been dedicated to local entries and the winner is voted for by the public.

It’s day five for the volunteer team from Toko Electrical Construction Co. Every day, two groups of 15 have been scraping and shaping a pile of snow into a giant image of Yubaba, the big-haired bathhouse proprietor from Studio Ghibli’s blockbuster Spirited Away. The team won in 2023 with the Catbus from another Ghibli film, My Neighbour Totoro, and are keen to do so again. Part-time snow sculptor Yasuko Kitada, armed with a clipboard, is in charge. “It’s warmer this year so it was quite difficult in the beginning but today is really cold – that’s what we want.”

Nearby, a team of artists is hoping that its sculpture of Japanese baseball megastar Shohei Ohtani will be popular with the voting public. With only a couple of days to go, tensions are high. “If there’s any melting, we’re allowed to fix it only once during the week before the judging,” says Kitada. She says that climate change is having an effect. “It’s warmer during the day now, even if it’s still cold at night.” Snow has been trucked in from mountains outside the city.

Further up the park are the out-of-competition sculptures, so professionally executed that it wouldn’t be fair to pit them against the amateurs. The top draws are usually the building-sized efforts – from the Taj Mahal to kabuki theatres – by soldiers from Japan’s Self Defense Forces (SDF). Some 3,600 SDF personnel stationed at nearby Makomanai are working on two epic pieces: one is a huge profile of characters from the Hokkaido-set manga series Golden Kamuy; the other is a recreation of old Sapporo Station, which was in use until 1952. By night, the sculptures are illuminated as vast crowds descend on the festival, with food-and-drink stands supplying refreshment.

The Snow Festival attracts visitors from all over the world, providing a welcome boost for the economy. This year there were 2.39 million attendees – numbers not seen since before the coronavirus pandemic. And the winner of the citizens’ competition? Yubaba, with Shohei Ohtani coming third. And with the top three teams gaining automatic entry to next year’s event, Kitada and her clipboard will be hoping for a third consecutive victory in 2025. — L
Sapporo Snow Festival runs from 4 to 11 February.
snowfes.com