Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Japan's Sapporo Snow Festival had to import
its snow this year
The first Sapporo Snow Festival was held in
Odori Park in 1950 when six snow statues were made by local high school
students. Surprisingly, the festival attracted about fifty thousand people. It
became popular across the country when the festival was broadcast on TV in 1959
and drew international attention after the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympic Games. In
recent years, the festival welcomes over 2 million visitors from Japan and
abroad to see spectacular snow and ice sculptures. This year, the 71st
snow festival took place from February 4 till 11. But there were two major shortages
the organizers and exhibitors suffer from.
One is the coronavirus, and Sapporo was no
exception. The total visitors dropped from 2.7 million last year to about 2.2
million. They can hope they’ll have more visitors next year.
But the other is not only this year’s problem.
The snowfall. Japan is experiencing a very mild winter in 2019-2010 season and seeing
a record low snowfall even in usually-snow-covered places like ski slopes and mountain
resorts. And Sapporo is no exception. The event organizers had to carry snow
from mountains that lie as far as 60 kilometers away from the even venues. And
they also had to scale down the size of the event. For example, the usually 100meter-long
snow slide was cut down to 70 meters this year.
Though the novel virus could be contained by
the next season, the warm climate doesn’t seem to end so soon.
Enjoy reading the article and seeing the
photos and think about how long the snow slide will be next year.
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