Sapporo Snow Festival: Oodori Site (1)

Hello everyone and welcome back to Tiro Finale for our month long coverage of the Sapporo Snow Festival. Today, we will finally be taking a look at the main attraction of the Sapporo Snow Festival and its international claim to fame, the giant ice sculptures! Located in Oodori Park, the aptly named Oodori site features various larger than life ice sculptures which span all the way from Sapporo Tower across Oodori Park all the way up to the Sapporo Shiryokan. This makes up an almost 2 km stretch of exhibits!

Needless to say, traversing the entire course of the Oodori site would easily take up a whole day. Never is the saying, the early birds gets the worm, any truer. As the shorter number of daylight hours means that getting to the site first thing in the morning is absolutely pivotal to make the most of your daylight. 

Arriving at the Oodori site at approximately 8 am, the park was already greeted with a large number of visitors despite it being a weekday and only the second day of the event. The first snow sculpture to greet us was one courtesy of Hard Rock cafe featuring a huge ice canvas of Miku and Kasumi Toyama from Bang Dream. If you look closely, you will even notice that Miku's guitar is shaped to resemble Hokkaido!

These large snow sculptures also serve double duty as a stage where there would be performances throughout the day. One of which I managed to catch was the US Army Band performing together with the local troops. 

Among all the sculptures on display in the Oodori site, this certainly takes the prize for being the most detailed one of them all. Now, you will have to forgive my poor memory because I cannot quite remember what exact building this is.

As with every sculpture, there is an included log which chronicles the entire build process from the initial planning stage all the way to the completion of their masterpieces. Each one requires months of planning and building with meticulous care put into consideration regarding the amount of time available at hand. And would you believe it, a large proportion of these sculptures were actually made by the Japanese Self Defense Force?

Sometimes, it may be a little difficult to capture the scale of these snow sculptures. Overlaying them against the surrounding building does help to provide some sense of scale. While they may not be full scale buildings, they still do come very close.

In fact, when viewed at certain angles, they even look right at home in the city. Of course, you would have to excuse the icy layers of snow covering every nook and cranny of the building. 

Whether viewed from afar or up close, the sheer detail in this particular snow sculpture was simply mind boggling. Imaging if you would have made a mistake and had to start all over again!

Then, there are the sculptures which make up for their lack of detailing with sheer volume of size. That is where these even larger snow sculptures come into play. 

Almost as if the train was busting out of the snowy bridge above it, the collaboration between JR (Japan Rail) and HTB commemorates a long partnership between the two in transporting fresh produce in and around Hokkaido. 

The train seen here is even modeled upon the actual train responsible for transporting fresh goods all around Hokkaido, the Red Bear. If I remember correctly, there are even several Red Bears which are still operational till this date. 

Well, this is as close as you can get without getting run over by a train. If the light and tow points were not enough emphasis on detail, the sculptors even took the trouble to sculpt the wipers on the window of the train!

Next up, we have probably one of the most popular snow sculptures in the entire Sapporo Snow Festival, the Star Wars sculpture. Made to commemorate the release of Episode 9 in 2019, the large winter show piece featured the three popular droids, R2-D2, C3PO and BB-8. Aside from them, the Millennium Falcon is also visible as is a properly scaled X-Wing. 

The X-Wing even has a neat party trick where visitors are allowed to enter the cockpit and have their photos taken. Although, in order to maintain the structural integrity of the sculpture, only a limited number of lucky attendees were allowed to do this by the means of collecting numbered tickets at designated times of the day. 

Star Wars is an immensely popular series both in Japan and abroad so, it comes as no surprise that there were the most number of people gathered around this particular snow sculpture to take pictures. 

We have seen snow buildings, vehicles and even anime characters. But, what about a giant snow cup noodle? Nissin was a major sponsor in this year's festival so, you could be more than certain that they would leave their mark on the festival in no small way. 

Towards the tail end of the Oodori site, was the competition grounds for the international snow sculpture competition. Expectedly, many countries which see very heavy snow fall throughout the year were in attendance and eager to make their best creations. 

Surprisingly, there were even countries without winter or snow (such as Thailand and Singapore) that participated in the event! While I did not stay till the end of the competition, I genuinely do wonder how these countries fared. 

Now before I bring an end to the first part of our Oodori Site coverage, allow me to present to you one of the most impressive structure in the entire festival, a ski ramp. Erected specially for the Snow Festival, the ski ramp is a recurring attraction that holds both shows and skill galleries throughout the entire festival The structure in itself is already a sight to behold but, adding that on with professional winter sport athletes pulling of insane tricks and stunts and it gets even better.

In the next part of our Oodori Site coverage, we will be taking a look at the more "anime" side of things because, after all, Snow Miku is their mascot. I hope you stay tuned for that and in the meantime, if you have any questions or thoughts, do not hesitate to let me know in the comments section below. Until the next time, thank you so much for reading and have yourself a wonderful day ahead!