Yuki Matsuri

Sapporo has a famous winter festival called Yuki (=snow) matsuri. Here is a link to the "official" website (click here). When I first heard about it I thought, "how nice, they have a festival for snow". As time went on, there was more and more hype about it (although all of the locals don't seem all that jazzed). Once the army rolled into town one whole month before the event and began preparation for the festival, I started to wonder just how big this thing was going to be.

Shawn and I dropped by Odori Koen (=Odori park, a big park in the middle of downtown) one day when preparations were about 3 weeks along to see just what they were up to. We were glad that we did because we got a chance to see how they go about creating the snow and ice sculptures. The proportions were amazing as were the number of people working away at this thing day and night. They built massive blocks of solid snow using plywood frames. When I say massive, I mean blocks that are 1 city block long and 6 stories tall - solid packed snow - for the bigger sculptures. The smaller ones were carved from blocks that were 3 meters tall. Scaffolding was built around the snow blocks then people went to work carving. Here is one of the scaffolding set ups and the people cutting and scraping away.


Here is construction of another one of the big blocks. In the first photo you can see the the wide view, the second shows a close up of some people working on a face.



Snow carvings constituted the majority of the scultures in Odori, but there were a few ice carvings too. As with the snow sculptures, the ice carvings were bigger than I could have imagined. Here is a photo of the biggest ice sculpture in construction.


On the weekend before the big opening, Shawn dropped down to the park to watch some of the carving and, as he does, made a few friends. The men who were carving a miniature replica of a Japanese shrine were happy to pose for a few photos for Shawn and eventually handed over the saw and let him help out. Here's a shot of Shawn, saw in hand, cutting off a piece of snow.


And here is the finished product of Shawn's (and a couple of other artists's) handywork.


Once the festival was in full swing, the tourists hit town in droves. I have run into more foreigners in the past couple of days than I have in total since arriving. The statistics say that about 2 million people come to Sapporo from all over the world in the span of a week to see the festival. That is a whole lot more people speaking english than we are used to... nice! I can make 5 friends per hour just having an Americano at Starbucks.

OK - now for some photos of the finished products.

Remeber the man's face that was being worked on above - he is in the center of this one on horseback. This was some kind of ad for Narnia the movie.


And here is the ice sculpture from above lit up and finished. It is a replica of the original Sapporo train station.


This is the life sized version of the shrine that Shawn helped out on. It was one of my favorites. It was incredible how much detail they incorporated.


And to end it off, here is one (another movie ad as I understand - it seems I am way out of touch with movies right now) this time with people in front for scale. The couple in this photo are our friends Anthony and Yoshiko who hosted dinner for us last weekend. They wandered through the festival and drank hot sake with us.


In a couple cold hours we were able to see most of the big carvings but missed the last two blocks of the park where most of the smaller carvings were located. I think that they had teams from different countries come and compete and also a section where local teams had a chance to try their hand at carving. We are going to go back again and see if we can get a look at the other carvings. This time we will wear warmer clothes and bring a thermos of tea.