2025 marks the 75^th incarnation of the Sapporo Snow Festival, now bigger than ever with over 200 snow and ice sculptures on display in the city’s Odori Park. We’re staying in a beautifully appointed Onsen Ryokan, a few minutes’ walk from this 1.5k narrow stretch of parkland in the heart of downtown Sapporo, so it’s a short if treacherous walk along icy snowy streets to the centre of everything. We pick our way ever so carefully along the sidewalks here, especially in the seriously cold early mornings with temps of -10 or -12, when new layers of ice have formed with fresh overnight snow. 

During the day the crowds are not too bad, so it’s easy enough to wander around, albeit with the ice underfoot. But come nightfall, it gets really busy with loads of families out for the light show and the enormous amount of street food on offer. It’s also rather loud, with some of the larger ice sculptures, many in excess of 10 metres in height and width, adding frenetic laser projections and club-style music, with the throngs herded in and out of roped off areas. There’s a real winter fairground atmosphere here, especially with the billowing steam and hunger-inducing aromas from the food stalls. The queues of course are unreal, and the one stipulation of eating from the food stalls is that you have to consume within their designated space (no eating on the hoof allowed), so it does cause bottle-necks. There’s also a cocktail list of hot wines, whiskies and sakes available and, of course, gallons of Sapporo Beer to swig down. 

The theme of the festival this year is “ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)” and “Snow Activities” with specially created  Japanese Anime characters called the ‘E-Defenders’, a group of 5 young warriors dedicated to utilising SDGs to defend the Earth’s environment (perhaps to ward off reckless Trump’s devastating actions…but I digress). Japanese Anime is a strong if not overwhelming theme of the festival, clearly aimed at kids who can identify with the various characters’ strengths and attributes. Each individual snow sculpture has a merchandise stall attached, complete with QR codes for AR activation of the sculpture, but also souvenirs to buy – so this is clearly a money-making exercise for the media companies behind the big anime brands. 

One of the biggest pieces is called “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime”, based on a very popular kids’ reincarnation-themed tv show commonly known as “Ten-Sura”. This large, one-off, specially-for-the-festival created snow sculpture depicts “That Time Sapporo Got Reincarnated in Tempest”. Whatever that means…

Another large set piece “A Thoroughbred Galloping Toward Sapporo” is pretty self-explanatory and one of the few non anime sculptures here that comes alive through light projection and very loud music. You can hear this all over the park. 

There are plenty more abstract sculptures dotted throughout from the Hongo Shin Memorial Museum of Sculpture’s offering that wouldn’t appeal to the younger audience (where’s Pikachu?), but for us older folks it was nice to see something a bit more arty and thoughtful – sculptural even – with pieces such as “Industrial Wind”, “Dent”, “ Echoes of Glow” and “The Voyage”. 

One of Sapporo’s most famous and impressive buildings is the Former Hokkaido Government Office, AKA The Red Brick Building, so it’s fitting that one of the largest snow sculptures here is of this building, beautifully lit up at night. Another large and impressive sculpture is of another one of Hokkaido’s most iconic buildings: Ginrinsou, a spectacular house from the late Meiji period built by a rich herring merchant and moved from a clifftop location to its current site in the fishing port of Otaru in 1938, now a hotel with a hot spring onsen. These sculptures are enormous, often 10 metres or more in height and make an imposing presence in the festival and, again, it was good to see something that’s properly cultural and not anime based. 

This festival marks the 49^th International Snow Sculpture Contest with nine teams competing from all over the world – South Korea, Hawaii USA, Portland USA, Indonesia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, Singapore and Thailand (where are you Australia?!!!). They have between the 3^rd and 6^th February to create their sculpture. Whilst most teams were clearly way ahead and almost finished on the day we walked past (the last day of sculpting) – a few final brush strokes were all that were needed – one team (Portland USA) was struggling for even a basic shape to emerge from their block of snow. And not a sculptor in sight, project abandoned? Hmmm, what to infer? An added oddity around this particular area was the presence of US Marines handing out leaflets in Japanese. Also hmmm. No idea what that was about…