“Snowmen” of Japan
BY “AWAKE!” CORRESPONDENT IN JAPAN
WHAT fun! Has it not often been a child’s delight to build a snowman? But in Sapporo, in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, they have super snowmen. Some of these weigh over a thousand tons, and are breathtaking in their artistic detail. There also are snow animals, birds and fishes, snow gods, snow trains and jumbo jets, snow houses, pagodas and castles—a virtual world modeled in snow!
It is a short-lived world, however—just four days in late January or early February. Then it is pulverized back into formless snow and carted away.
The site of this festival in snow, Sapporo, is called “Japan’s City of Youth.” Though little more than one hundred years old, it has blossomed into a bustling metropolis of 930,000 people. Strangely, a recent snow model depicted “Sapporo’s One-Millionth Citizen” as a bleary-eyed individual with just two bottom teeth. Most of the city’s hardy populace look healthier than that!
Japanese cities generally grew out of groups of feudal villages, with narrow, winding alleys for streets. But Sapporo is different. Designed with the aid of British and American town planners, it has wide, straight boulevards, and a 330-foot-wide park runs east and west through the center of the city. This is lined with lilac and acacia trees, which blend with green lawns and colorful beds of flowers in summer. However, it is a contrast in white in wintertime, and especially during the festival in snow.
A Festival That Snowballed
This festival dates from about 1950. To brighten the drudgery of the north’s long winter, the children were organized to build snow models, for fun and exercise. As the festival grew larger, the city fathers saw big possibilities in using it to popularize Sapporo. The festival has now snowballed into one of mammoth proportions.
A solid snow platform is constructed for each exhibit, and wooden scaffoldings are anchored into this base. These must be sturdy, as a thousand-ton avalanche of snow and ice can be dangerous to the viewer! Several years ago, a replica of Noah’s ark collapsed during construction, and had to be done over again. Had the builders simply followed the blueprint given in the Bible book of Genesis, instead of the imaginary pattern of the movie “The Bible,” they would no doubt have produced a sturdier ark. But at least the animals were beautifully accurate, true-to-life representations.
For the 1970 exhibition, ancient history was represented in a beautifully “carved” representation, forty-five feet high and one hundred feet broad, of the Abu-Simbel Rock Temple of Egypt, said to have been built by Ramses II in celebration of his conquest of the Sudan. This was complete with pharaohs, winged lions and hieroglyphics, which looked just as baffling to the Japanese as Japanese writing does to outsiders.
Modern history was featured at another exhibition site, where the visitor could make his ‘first big steps’ among craters of the moon, but with feet crunching snow instead of moon dust. Alongside, two snowman astronauts, a snow lunar module and a snow Apollo 11 rocket lent realism to the scene.
A Child’s Delight in Snow and Ice
However, the “show” is mainly a child’s delight. For here, depicted in snow, are many of the stories, from Japan and from the West, that have been told and retold to children down through the centuries. One display, stretching the width of the city park, depicts Princess Snow White arriving at “the dazzling castle of the Prince.” She comes by “bullet” train, accompanied by the dwarfs, two of whom sit astride the train. A tremendous Gulliver, weighing probably two thousand tons, lies stretched across the park. Snow models of children perform winter sports around his waist while real children in colorful berets and jerseys cluster around his feet to have their pictures taken.
In the next block of the park there is a white-haired, white-faced Urashima Taro, the Rip Van Winkle of Japan, riding out of Japanese folklore on a hundred-ton all-white turtle.
Around the larger models are arrayed many smaller exhibits, including household animals, foxes, badgers and bears. How the children love to hug these life-size animals at close quarters, and to climb up on their icy backs!
As a variation, one full block displays exhibits fashioned out of clear ice! Outstanding among these is a seven-tiered pagoda, its icicle-like structure sparkling with colored lights at night. Nearby, chiseled delicately and skillfully out of ice blocks, are to be seen a farmhouse, barn and farm animals. There is also a treasure ship and a veritable menagerie in ice: frogs, a penguin, a camel, a cobra, a swan, a “black” cat, a bear (safely tied to the fence), a crab, a turtle and arctic dogs.
Snow Gods and Men Demolished
Since Japan is a Buddhist country, a monstrous statue of the Bosatsu-Hanka Buddha, standing thirty-six feet in height, is displayed prominently at the central park. But even “Buddha,” though exquisitely carved on the exterior, is just like any other man-made image inside—only a little colder in Sapporo. He is solid enough to weather most storms, although a fubuki (blizzard) during the festival can be hard on his visitors. And if soft snow does accumulate in his eyes and ears, fire trucks and ladders are on hand to hose and brush it out again. For four crisp days and four illuminated nights, Buddha reigns along with his fellow gods and exhibits.
After these four transitory days of glory, all the exhibits of gods and men and others must be demolished, as they would be a danger to children and other passersby if left to be decomposed by the elements. Already, on the morning after the festival, “Buddha” has lost a finger. Soon, workers are busy with pick and shovel, destroying him and his fellows from the top down. Sometimes these “gods” receive a parting dispensation of sake wine, poured between their icy teeth, to steady them against the blows of the pick-and-shovel men.
In a sense, this demolition work on “Buddha” represents what many of the thinking citizens of Sapporo are now doing. This city, and indeed the entire snow-swept island of Hokkaido, is proving to be one of the most fruitful fields for Kingdom witnessing in Japan. As Jehovah’s witnesses preach from the Holy Bible to these humble people, many of them have come to realize that “Buddha,” however beautifully sculptured, is still merely an idol, and that, as the Bible states, “an idol is nothing in the world.” (1 Cor. 8:4; Ps. 115:4-8) In their hearts they are demolishing the “Buddha” idea, just as completely as workmen demolish the gods of the snow festival.
Though the festival in snow brings forth many striking and graceful masterpieces in art, these are man-made and last but for a few days. And can any of these begin to compare with the loveliness of the snowy landscape that Jehovah weaves through the countryside each wintertime? This He has been doing for thousands of years. Snow models, like the gods some of them represent, come and go, but the magnificent cycles of Jehovah’s earthly arrangement will go on forever, to the pleasurable enjoyment of those who love him. It will be even as he promised long ago, in the time of Noah: “All the days the earth continues, seed sowing and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, will never cease.”—Gen. 8:22.