Photos from Sapporo Snow Festival 2012

I'm interested to see how Google tying things together could make my life easier, so instead of rambling about another restaurant how about I try sharing some photos instead? I've put up an album of snaps of this year's snow festival on Google+ which I'm still kind of feeling out. STILL. I've been on there forever, or close to it.

So click on the following link and check it out. The album should be public and anyone should be able to see it, but I never take anything for granted.

Sapporo Snow Festival 2012

Yosakoi X Snow Festival

Park Air! Go!

Today was the last day of the Snow Festival and also a public holiday so there was a lot going on. Park Air is a ridiculous looking snowboard jump erected in the middle of Sapporo and we got to witness the Park Air FINAL NIGHT SESSION! as the announcer informed us about fifty times. Since I have to work this weekend and can't go to the big super-star snowboarding competition Big Air it was cool to see this.

Gifts I've Been Given - Snow Festival

This weekend I drank, went to a wedding, sang, drank some more, and went snowboarding so no posts were posted over the weekend, I'll just play catch-up a bit now.

Like I mentioned before when I went to the Snow Festival a bunch of elementary school kids wanted to ask questions to foreigners, and in return they wanted to give you some hand crafted welcome to Sapporo kinda gifts. It was adorable:


That's a few origami cranes (one only half finished, one on a ribbon) some hand-written letters and some maps of Chitose hand-made on computers and featuring some interesting design decisions:


When I think of Chitose outlet mall I certainly think of Abe Lincoln. And tiny blue and pink elephants coz they're on the TV ad. But mostly Abe Lincoln.

The hand written letters are all in Japanese, but it's super-simple kids Japanese so I can get the idea and Shino and Yuki read them out to me too. One is addressed to "Mr. or Mrs. Foreign Person" and one says "Maybe next time you can tell me your dreams!" which is just beyond cute.

Sapporo Snow Festival 2009

Of course I went down to the 60th annual Sapporo Snow Festival before work today. It was the first day and we were stopped four times by elementary school kids wanting to ask us questions for their English assignments. This happened last year too and it's awful cute, but this year came with the bonus of gifts from the kids. I got some letters (in Japanese), some origami cranes and some... frankly odd maps of Chitose that I'll write about some other time. I've never actually been to Chitose (just south of Sapporo, home of the airport and the outlet mall) so I reckon I'll probably use them sometime. There were indeed a lot of foreigners, so they had rich pickings.

It snowed heavily for most of the day too, and certainly while we were walking around. It makes for a nice Snow Festival atmosphere, but after a while you're getting wetter and wetter and it starts obscuring the statues. I guess they clean them up a bit at night? I certainly wasn't dressed for it as I was heading to work straight after, but it was worth it.


The big statue which was in this place last year, and which was in a similar style so I guess it was by the same team, was my favourite. This year it was probably my favourite again, I like the accuracy and the clean lines. Owls and Eagles - together at last.


Here are the pros going to work on the official competition blocks. These are the same two blocks I posted a picture of the other day, and I'll go back and check in a few days when they're done.


And this is the - frankly underdressed - Miss Hong Kong posing in front of the Hong Kong entry. Don't worry, she put her coat back on straight after the photo op.


And finally the humble offering I helped Jesi to make. I'm gonna go again!

Sapporo Snow Fesitval 2009 - Pre-Game

The 60th Sapporo Snow Festival kicks off tomorrow, and well, I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl. Here's some pre-festival snaps I took last weekend before I lent Jesi a hand.

Citizens statues by people from Sapporo

These big-ass blocks will be the international snow sculpture competitors' blocks.

The big statue in this spot was my favourite one last year.

Ah industrious people, freezing their fingers off.

Sapporo Snow Fesitval 2009 - Pitching In

Snow Festival starts on Thursday! Yeah! And just like last year Jesi managed to get a space for a small snow statue, and I went along to help out.


The small "citizens statues" are open to Sapporo residents but you have to enter a lottery to get a place. Jesi entered and got one of the 150 small blocks for the second time in two years! Way to go Jesi! This year she's making a tribute to the trash-ninjas of Sapporo. The trash-ninjas (as we call them) are a bunch of guys who dress up in old-fashioned clothes and go around town picking up litter and tossing it into bags on their backs and doing backflips and singing and dancing and stuff. They're on about the 11th level of awesome, so someone needed to pay tribute to them. In Jesi's statue there's a ninja and two samurai (what's the plural of samurai? samurais? samuraises?) around Sapporo's iconic TV Tower and bin at the bottom. She's still got one day to go, but it's looking good so far.

This year I worked on it a lot more than I did last year, meaning that I froze my ass off for longer than last year. It was really satisfying and rewarding though, and getting all bundled up and hacking away at a big lump of ice and snow with an axe seems like a great way to spend a weekend anyway. Jesi had a plan, and hers is looking way better than a lot of them, but some people - even though they're just regular Sapporo citizens - take it very seriously:


I think I saw those guys making a similarly perfect castle last year too. There are arsenals of tools laid out around some of them, and huge teams of people all chipping in all over the place. And when it comes to the big ones:


There are lots and lots of soldiers.

Snow Festival Prelude / My Part In Its Downfall

Sapporo’s internationally, globally, world famous Snow Festival kicked off this morning with an opening ceremony that featured “Miss ~ from all over Japan”. I haven’t been down to check it out yet, and I’ll have to live with the disappointment of missing that cavalcade of lovelies, but I can at least bring you news from the build up last weekend.

Sapporo Snow Festival apparently attracts over two million visitors a year. Sapporo is a city of around one point seven million people. Now I’ve expressed scepticism about this in the past, but here I’m going to go right out and call shenanigans here. Where the hell could we possibly fit all those people? Today someone said “Yes, but Sapporo does have a lot of hotels”, which is true, but does it have a hotel district BIGGER THAN THE REST OF THE CITY? Christ on a bike.

I was in town on Saturday and Sunday though, and the large number of tourists was pretty apparent. It’s not like I’m the only Caucasian in the city here, but certainly I don’t see all that many white folks in my average week. This weekend there were loads of them as soon as I got off the train. And while there’s a natural snobbishness (that I’m not going to deny) that you get about any city in which you live, it really didn’t bother me all that much. UNTIL that is, I was in a tiny, tiny vintage shop where the woman at the counter asked me in Japanese if I was in town for the Snow Festival. Putting aside the fact that if I were in town for the Snow Festival I probably wouldn’t have understood her, I replied “No… I live here” in a kind of crestfallen way. Oh well, it was an awesome shop, and the whole time I was in there she seemed to be giving a Ukulele lesson to another woman who was standing at the counter. Seriously.

On any other day that would’ve easily won the day’s medal for best shop, but I also managed to stumble upon a bookshop that sold both new and ancient, second hand children’s books, art and design books, fabulous stationery and a bunch of other things. The shop was on the third floor of some no-mark building off the beaten track, and I talked to the owner for ages, as he had excellent English from working in New York for two years as a butcher (!). His stock was endlessly fascinating, and I should probably write a whole piece sometime about the appetite for travel and assimilation of western culture that allows you to strike up long conversations with Japanese people in a way that foreign nationals never could in the UK or America. I also bought a phenomenally cool mechanical pencil from the Czech Republic. Sweet!

Wait… I was going to talk about the Snow Festival I think. So even more awesome than going shopping was the fact that I got to help out with Jesi’s Snow Sculpture, which was one of the small blocks of snow that they allocate to the citizens of Sapporo. There are 120 citizens sculptures altogether, and they are raffled off to people from a list of 600 entrants. Of course most teams consist of half a dozen members, and they all enter in order to secure a block. Jesi entered all on her own and scored spot number 112 of 120. I helped out for maybe three hours in total, and frankly I take little pride in it, as both times I only actually turned up to apologise in person for not helping out, only to actually end up helping out. Still, check out all the pictures; those wrists and the drumstick in his right hand… all me baby. It was fun, and we felt a little special as we got a lot of double takes from Japanese people who didn’t expect to see any foreign people making snow sculptures. The only other foreign non-pros that I saw were the US NAVY team. Our sculpture was better than theirs.

A massive number of citizen’s sculptures are cartoon characters and company mascots, which is really very sensible since those characters are mostly large blobs with other blobs attached. A pretty safe bet for snow sculpting. They have to open up some of the blocks of the park to allow the citizens to get access to their sculptures, so I probably saw most of the big statues last weekend and they’re all pretty cool. I’ll be going down again in the next couple of days to have a proper look, but as everyone says – it will be very cold, there will be too many people, and I will catch flu and die. My question for all of my students this week is “Are you going to the Snow Festival” to which the answer is 95% NO. For the people of Sapporo this whole thing is just a week long inconvenience.

Lets knock this on the head with my favourite Snow Festival trivia right now.

Firstly while the main Snow Festival site is in Odori Park, the park that runs for a dozen city blocks across the centre of the city, the big sculptures are actually placed carefully slightly to the west. This is because there’s an underground mall to the east of the park, and the massive weight of a large snow sculpture would crash through the ceiling and destroy the wonder that is Aurora Town.

Secondly the Snow Festival is actually smaller now than it was a few years ago, not just because they’ve had a run of years with poor snow, but because of Japan’s increased military presence on the global stage. Apparently the Hokkaido SDF base sent troops to Iraq a few years ago, and as the SDF has always been one of the main contributors to the Snow Festival there were suddenly less people to make the massive sculptures. Is it shallow to make a joke about that being yet another reason to hate the war in Iraq?

Yes, it is