Harrison's JET Blog: Snow Festival, Daytime

Back at the Snow on Sunday morning. The huge constructed slopes had skiiers and snowboarders doing stunts.

Tiny little snow dude.

The poor TV tower mascot has no arms. He's completely helpless when the kids come for him.

Hokuto City's mascot, Zushi Hokki. He's a little weird.

I've seen some kids at school with his merchandise.

He's supposed to be a surf clam nigiri, if you couldn't tell.

Here's a game for the kids where snowmen are projected on a screen and they throw snowballs at them. Entirely unnecessarily, there was a live announcer. The top score was 31 seconds.

There were a bunch of live music performances going on during the day.

I don't know where this band was from but they all spoke English.

There was an idol group singing and dancing in front of this one.

I feel bad for them in their skirts.

There was a bigger orchestra performing in front of the Helsinki building. I was just in time for their big, hour long performance.

Their set included such songs as the theme from the anime Detective Conan, and Senbonzakura (One thousand cherry trees), a very popular Vocaloid song by Miku. When introducing that song, it was mentioned that Hatsune Miku was created in Sapporo, which explains why she's such a big part of the marketing here.

And here they are performing a certain American anthem. Japanese people are more shy about participating.

Here's where I took more pictures of the snow sculptures in the daytime light.