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Lake Shikotsu Ice Festival: Ice Grown from a Lake That Never Freezes
Lake Shikotsu is a caldera lake south of Sapporo, among the clearest bodies of water in Ja…
Lake Shikotsu is a caldera lake south of Sapporo, among the clearest bodies of water in Japan and so deep that it never freezes, even in a Hokkaido midwinter. Which makes it a strange birthplace for an ice festival—and that is exactly the local logic. Beginning each December, workers spray the lake's water over wooden and metal frames, layer after layer, night after night, growing a village of ice objects on the shore of Shikotsuko Onsen. The name of the festival, hyoto, borrows the character for a great cresting wave and freezes it.
By day the ice is blue—the deep mineral blue locals call Shikotsu Blue, the color of the lake carried up into the sculptures. By night the site becomes a lit labyrinth: tunnels of ice, towers of ice, a slide the children queue for in the dark, colors shifting through the frozen walls. On weekend evenings, fireworks burst over the lake.
The festival began in 1979, invented by local people who wanted their unfreezable lake to have a winter face. Because the ice is grown, not carved, no two years look alike; temperature and wind decide the forms.
Practically, this is the most accessible deep-winter festival in Hokkaido: about forty minutes by car or bus from New Chitose Airport, which makes it the first Hokkaido winter many travelers ever meet. The onsen baths of the lakeside inns are the reward for the cold. Lights come on at dusk. Dress heavier than you think necessary, and wear shoes that grip.
Planes descend in steady succession over the flat southern edge of Hokkaido, their approach paths crossing fields of wheat and sugar beet before the runway at Shin-Chitose appears. For most passengers, Chitose is a transit point — the gateway north — but the city beneath those flight paths has its own accumulated weight, shaped by military presence, large-scale agriculture, and a river whose name was changed in 1805 to honor the crane.
The Chitose River runs through a town where the self-defense forces account for roughly a quarter of the population, giving the streets a particular demographic texture: young, transient, yet rooted in infrastructure. Each summer the Chitose Kichi Kōkūsai draws crowds to watch aircraft maneuvers overhead, while the Shimin Natsu Matsuri and a separate bon-odori competition fill the calendar with the ordinary rhythm of civic life. In Aoba Park, a cross-country ski course cuts through the same ground that hosts baseball in warmer months. The Naibetsu River spring water, designated among Japan's notable clean waters, feeds into a landscape where salmon and cherry salmon — local catch alongside himemasu — are both farmed through hatchery and release programs.
West of the city, the mountains of Shikotsu-Tōya National Park rise — Eniwadake and Fuppushidake visible on clear days — and the shore of Lake Shikotsu holds a small hot-spring cluster at Shikotsu-ko Onsen. Deeper in the city's past, the Kiusu Kantobo burial mounds and the Usakumai site group carry traces of Jōmon settlement, now recognized as part of a broader Hokkaido and Northern Tōhoku heritage. The airport terminal and its adjacent outlet mall, Rera, pull commercial energy in one direction; the water, the ruins, and the mountains quietly pull in another.
Stay in Chitose, Hokkaido
What converges here
- Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Hokkaido and Northern Tohoku
- Usakumai Archaeological Sites
- Kiusu Circumferential Burial Mound Group
- Shikotsu-Toya
- Mount Eniwa
- Mount Fuppushi
- Shin-Chitose-Kuko
- Chitose
- Minami-Chitose
- Minami-Chitose
- Osatsu
- New Chitose Airport