Guide to Sapporo Snow Festival 2024
Sapporo Snow Festival: The Biggest Winter Festival in Japan Held at Sapporo City
The Sapporo Snow Festival or Sapporo Yuki Matsuri (さっぽろ雪まつり) in Japanese is the biggest winter festival in Japan!
Sapporo City is the capital city of Hokkaido Prefecture, the northernmost prefecture of Japan. So as can be expected from being in the North, Hokkaido Prefecture is famous for being one of the coldest areas of Japan with heavy snowfalls during Winter.
And what can you do when you have lots of snow every year? Obviously, snow sculptures! Held in early February every year, the Sapporo Snow Festival started in 1950 and became bigger and bigger and nowadays is one of the top tourist attractions in Japan during Winter time. Before 2020 the festival was welcoming over 2 million visitors from Japan and abroad and now is back again! The 74th Sapporo Snow Festival 2024 is being held from 4th to 11th February in 2024.
Sapporo Snow Festival
The Sapporo Snow Festival have 3 venues: Odori Site, Susukino Site and Tsu Dome Site.
The main part of the festival is held in Otori Site. While walking in the 1.5km long main street, visitors can enjoy the famous and impressive snow sculptures, including over 10 m tall large scale ones as well as food/beverage stalls, dance shows, shops and more. At night time, some of the sculptures light-up and a few have even an illumination show!
In the other hand the Susukino site is located in Hokkaido’s red-light district Susukino area, and is the venue for the ice made sculptures. If you want to take a rest from visiting, you can enter in one of the ice-bars.
Lastly, the Tsu Dome Site it’s the funniest area of the festival and the children’s (and not so children’s) favorite! Usually this venue hold snow attractions such as snow slides and snow maze.
The 73rd Sapporo Snow Festival will be held only at Odori Site and Susukino Site from 4th to 11th February in 2024.
My Experience at Sapporo Snow Festival
I had never been to a snow festival before and I really loved it!
My friends and I arrived for the last days of the festival. Our first day in Sapporo even though we caught an early morning flight between arriving, checking in at the hotel and going to lunch we didn’t have much time left to see all the snow sculptures at the festival. But we did get there in time to enjoy what became one of my favorite parts of the festival, the yosakoi style dance performances by students from different schools and universities.
Yosakoi is a unique dance style created in Japan and seen at festivals (called matsuri in Japanese). This dance is characterized by being very energetic and lively, and I love it! You can see how the participants give their all and give it their all, while enjoying themselves. Another particularity of this dance is that there is always one of the members behind all the others holding a huge flag, representing the group. Flying that giant flag and holding it up is not easy and requires a lot of strength, and it is a part that I like a lot too.
We were also able to enjoy some of the delicious food from the food stalls. As it started to snow and it was cold, in the evening we went for a delicious Sapporo-style ramen for dinner.