Towada Winter Story

While Sapporo’s Yuki Matsuri is unarguably this country’s premier winter festival, many other cities throughout Japan hold similar festivals on a smaller scale, exhibiting local faire and celebrating the bounty of snow. One such festival is the Lake Towada Winter Story Festival (Towadako Fuyu Monogatari), now in its 70th year, which takes place in Towadako National Park, just outside of the city of Towada. While it’s a fairly small festival, it really has a good selection of attractions for its size.
When you first enter the festival grounds, you're greeted by walls of snow that have cavities carved out in them that house electric light bulbs.
The main stage for the festival housed two large snow sculptures of floats from the Nebuta Festival.
Much like in Sapporo, Towada's Festival featured a number of igloos. Although these igloos were somewhat ugly on the outside, their interiors were far nicer.

Matt even attempted to use his new sorcerer's beard and a collection of candles to cast a summoning spell inside of one of the igloos. He was largely unsuccessful.
There was also a fairly large slide for kids to sled down. I didn't bring my own sled as many of the children had done and didn't really feel like sliding down the slope using the shopping bags that were provided.
One of the cooler things that they had on hand was the "Snow Cat," basically a huge tank that you could go for a ride in for ¥500. While the ride only lasted a few minutes, it was something like a snow roller coaster, which is to say, pretty fucking cool. You could also rent snowmobiles for riding on the same track but we all found the high prices a bit prohibitive.
Tucked away in a corner of the festival was the onsen (hot spring bath) area, that featured an indoor onsen as well as what appeared to be a few smaller baths for outdoor public bathing. While I was told that I should try to convince Ryan to strip down and bathe publicly, he didn't get nearly drunk enough for me to talk him into it.
One department in which Towada could never hope to compete with Sapporo was that of snow sculpture. Notice that I am trying my hardest to display some enthusiasm for the festival despite the crappiness of the barely recognizable Totoro next to which I stand (as a point of comparison, here’s Sapporo’s version of the venerable forest cat).
As can be expected of a Japanese festival, there was a veritable cornucopia of delicious foods to be consumed. One of the more popular areas was a building where you could purchase any number of uncooked foods for grilling on a table-top grill yakiniku style.
There was also a second indoor eating area for the cheaper among us that housed stalls selling mainly traditional Japanese festival foods. Ryan was clearly not entertained.
There's nothing quite like the friendly neighborhood sausage lollypop man! I guess someone in Japan must've taken that conversation in There's Something About Mary about meats on a stick as a call to arms because there's certainly no dearth of them here.
As night fell, the festival’s main stage came alive with a number of performances ranging from shamisen players to reenactments of the Nebuta Festival. Here we see some demons doing what they do best: playing the shit out of some taiko drums.
The night came to an end with the main event: a fireworks show. Although I'm generally pretty bored by such things (thanks to Chicago's summer fireworks shows that illuminate downtown twice a week) this show was unique in that, in the absence of strict safety guidelines such as those in America, the fireworks were allowed to go off directly above our heads. It was actually a really good show for a place the size of Towada.
We finished up the night by heading back into Towada and hitting up a number of the city's finer establishments. Here we see Pilsen, probably one of the best bars I've been to in Aomori in terms of price, atmosphere and the quality of beer. Ryan, however, was still not entertained.