The Sapporo Snow Festival is a wintery white paradise where castles, celebrities, and the nation’s favorite anime characters are brought to life in ice and snow.
For a week every February, the city of Sapporo on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido transforms into a land of fascinating wintery wonders. During the Sapporo Snow Festival (Yuki Matsuri), the city’s streets are lined with giant sculptures of snow and ice in a spectacle that attracts more than 2 million people every year.
Sapporo’s Yuki Matsuri blossomed from humble beginnings, however. It all started in the 1950s when some local high schoolers built six snow statues in the city’s Odori Park one winter just for fun. They could not have guessed that more than 50,000 people would come out to see their creations and their idea would flourish into an annual snow festival attracting visitors from all over Japan and the world. The ever-growing event features ski slopes, ice-skating rinks, ice bars, and colossal show-stopping snow statues, some measuring up to 75 feet wide and 50 feet high, that require a staggering 3,500 tons of snow to make. The festival has expanded to include three distinct areas—the Odori site, the Tsudome site, and the Susukino site—each with their own attractions and unique charm.
All photos by Jason Haidar