Otaru is a nineteenth-century herring port with a stone warehouse canal, forty minutes from Sapporo, and its festival is the deliberate opposite of its neighbour's: no sculpture, no scale. Volunteers hollow out snow, place candles in the hollows, and light several thousand of them each evening along the canal, the disused railway line and the side streets.
Floating lanterns are set on the canal itself.
No attendance figure is collected in this pass.
It overlaps the Sapporo Snow Festival by design, and the two are routinely done together — Sapporo by day for the sculptures, Otaru in the evening for the candles. The train between them runs late during the festival week.
PlanningA ten-day February window overlapping the Sapporo festival — most visitors do both.
Dates
Season
Computed from the recurrence rule we record for this entry, not copied from a listing. A date marked ~ comes from a calendar conversion and the observance may fall a day or two either side.