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Winter in Sapporo, Japan

The Sapporo Snow Festival

A City of Ice to Warm Winter

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times, Travel,
Dec.26, 1999
(Hypertext added by E. Craib)

At the Sapporo Snow Festival, Bugs Bunny and Pokemon are huge, Buda Castle is cool and the slides are just plain fun.

At first, I wondered if I had sipped hot sake for breakfast instead of coffee. For there, stretched out in front of me, were multistory buildings and towering monuments and huge concert stages and long slides, all glistening white and made entirely of snow.

 These were to ice carvings what Mount Rushmore is to sculpture, and they were invested with a whimsy not always associated with Japan.

Bugs Bunny soared 33 feet tall, a cup of instant noodles towered 23 feet high, a Hungarian palace stood 66 feet high, and 49-foot Pokémon characters emerged as Brobdingnagian figures looming over crowds of children zipping down ice slides.

I had seen ice sculptures elsewhere in Japan and had enjoyed the Harbin Snow Festival in northeast China, but my visit to the Sapporo Snow Festival last winter topped them all. Perhaps the most famous snow festival in the world, it is the highlight of the year for Sapporo, the major city on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

Many of Japan's lovely sites do not impress small children, I have discovered, but the snow festival is designed as a family event. And my children, then 1, 4 and 6, gave it 9 1/2 points out of 10 (a half-point being deducted for long lines at slides). Of course, our kids -- having had little experience with snow -- may have been unusually easy to please. Our plane had no sooner touched down at the airport near Sapporo then they were delirious with excitement.

"Snow!" shouted Geoffrey, the 4-year-old, and they all began to assess the height of drifts beside the runway with the same accuracy that a fisherman uses to measure the ones that get away. When we were in the terminal, asking about train tickets to Sapporo, Geoffrey and his 6-year-old brother, Gregory, suddenly disappeared -- they had gone outside to have a snowball fight.

About a quarter of a million people -- including many foreigners -- journey to Sapporo during the one-week period when the sculptures are on display, and space in trains, planes and hotels is desperately tight. At the end of the week, the organizers demolish all the sculptures because, they say, it would be too sad to see their works of art slowly melt and become disfigured.

Next year will be the 50th-anniversary Sapporo snow festival, founded on Feb. 18, 1950, when a group of high school students made six snow sculptures in Odori Park in the center of town. It took off from there, but the secret of the festival's success is that Japan's military -- which calls itself the Self-Defense Forces -- does most of the work.

(formatting work in progress...but it is quite readable now )

The Self-Defense Forces are concentrated in Hokkaido because historically, there was concern about an invasion from the neighboring Soviet Union. But World War II has made Japan deeply suspicious of its military, and so the Self-Defense Forces go out of their way to take on challenges that improve their public image.

 A result is the modern Sapporo Snow Festival. It would be impossibly costly for the private sector to organize, and it would be regarded as a waste of money by any civilian government department.
But the Self-Defense Forces have no invasions to defend against, so each year some 1,700 soldiers take a couple of months off and use 250 army trucks to make about 7,600 round trips to lug snow from the mountains to make the gigantic sculptures.

After having heard for many years about the festival, I went with my wife, Sheryl, and our

three children from Tokyo, where we were living. There are day tours from Tokyo, leaving

at dawn and returning late at night, but we decided that would give us only a taste. There are

also group tours, but in the end we found that it was a bit cheaper to book flights and hotels

separately.

It is a relatively expensive time to visit Hokkaido, though, because prices are all jacked up for

the festival: round-trip air fare from Tokyo costs about $435, at 102 yen to the dollar, and a

Western-style hotel room runs another $250 a night. We flew up to Sapporo on a Friday

night and returned to Tokyo on a Sunday night, and even that was a bit rushed.

Many of Japan's lovely sites do not impress small children, I have discovered, but the snow

festival is designed as a family event. And my children, then 1, 4 and 6, gave it 9 1/2 points

out of 10 (a half-point being deducted for long lines at slides). Of course, our kids -- having

had little experience with snow -- may have been unusually easy to please. Our plane had no

sooner touched down at the airport near Sapporo then they were delirious with excitement.

"Snow!" shouted Geoffrey, the 4-year-old, and they all began to assess the height of drifts

beside the runway with the same accuracy that a fisherman uses to measure the ones that get

away. When we were in the terminal, asking about train tickets to Sapporo, Geoffrey and his

6-year-old brother, Gregory, suddenly disappeared -- they had gone outside to have a

snowball fight.

We spent our first night in a Japanese-style hotel where one room somehow accommodated

all of us. The children liked sleeping on futons on the tatami-mat floor, but mostly they

enjoyed the vacant snow-covered lot next door. Friends with two children had made the trip

with us from Tokyo and the children all played in the snow until about midnight.

In contrast to most Japanese cities, Sapporo is young, with a bit of the same feel as the

American West. Indeed, there are several parallels, for Hokkaido was Japan's frontier, and

until 1869 it was inhabited only by small numbers of an indigenous people known as Ainu.

They speak their own language, which is very different from Japanese, and look more like

Westerners than like Asians. (Indeed, a couple of times in Japan I've jokingly tried to pass

myself off as an Ainu, although not terribly successfully.)

The Ainu, never numerous, are now found only in a few villages, and their language has

largely died out. Waves of Japanese migrants took their land and built cities like Sapporo

beginning in the late 19th century. As a result, there are no ancient temples, and streets are

relatively wide, without the mazelike quality of Tokyo and most other Japanese cities. The

people of Sapporo are also unusually relaxed and friendly, even boisterous by Japanese

standards (although to be boisterous by Japanese standards is to be sedate by American

calibration).

The winter Olympics were held in Sapporo in 1972, and Hokkaido is still the winter

playground for Japan. Several other snow festivals are held annually elsewhere in Hokkaido,

although not on the same scale as Sapporo's. Hokkaido also has many outdoor hot springs,

and one can soak naked in an outside hot spring in the snowy woods, admiring the

surrounding ice and cold from the comfort of a steaming spring -- and sip hot sake from a

little cup resting on a wooden tray floating in the water.

Our first expedition the morning after we arrived was to Susukino, one of the three sites of

the festival. I did not bother mentioning it to Sheryl, but I had some apprehensions about

what we might encounter, as the only thing I knew about Susukino was that it is Sapporo's

famous red light district. But aside from a Japanese-language sign advertising a Soaplands

massage parlor, there was nothing in the snow sculpture area to suggest that it was a sex

district.

The sculptures in Susukino were

small, mostly less than 10 feet tall, and

included Chinese junks, Viking

warriors and slides for children. Just a

bit farther, though, at the Odori site in

downtown Sapporo, were a series of

spectacular sculptures -- although

sculpture is too modest a word, for

these were buildings and castles made

of snow. Several had slides for

children and many had huge snow

stages on which bands and dancers

were performing to large crowds, with

sound systems and colored lights.

My children loved a set of igloos,

which they explored thoroughly, but

my own favorite was a steep ski jump. Some adept skiers raced down the slope, soared in

the air and did a flip before landing right in front of the crowd, almost at our feet. It was

much more dramatic than most ski jump events because it took place in a street in the center

of a city.

For a midafternoon lunch, we visited Sapporo's Ramen Alley, a tiny strip of ramen noodle

restaurants off a back alley only about a yard wide. The restaurants were in the same

proportions -- a few small tables, each bumping against the other -- but the hot noodles were

excellent and warming, and only about $5 a person.

In the evening, we visited the largest site, at a military base near the Jieitaimae subway

station, a 20-minute ride from the center of Sapporo. This is where Bugs Bunny and the

cup-of-noodles presided, along with Hungary's Buda Castle and the Pokémon character

Pikachu.

This area was bigger than a football field, with fast-food stands in the middle and ice

architecture at the ends. At night, colored floodlights lighted up the area, and a fireworks

display soared over Buda Castle to the aahs of a crowd of many thousands. Our 1-year-old,

Caroline, toddled around the snow, dazzled by the sight and waving to friendly Japanese

who cooed over her.

We returned to Sapporo for a late dinner at Hyakko, an excellent Japanese restaurant. Crab

and other seafood is plentiful in Sapporo, so we had hairy crab and assorted sashimi and a

wonderful salmon stew -- all washed down with hot sake.

The previous evening, we were disappointed that the ice slides at the military base were

closed. The site is really for children so we went again in the morning for another go.

There was also a huge maze of ice, and an artificial ice mountain that kids could slide down

on inner tubes (all provided, with plenty of volunteers to ensure safety). The whole affair

was impeccably organized; the only problem was that the sculptures were so fabulous that

they attracted throngs. There was usually a wait of an hour or more for the good slides. The

way to avoid the crowds is to go when Japanese children are in school: either a weekday

morning or afternoon.

Incidentally, adults are allowed to use the slides, too. That would be immature, I suppose,

and it would be best to do it in the guise of accompanying a child or conducting research. But

on the basis of my research: the slides are fast and fun and wonderful.