Japanese build 12,379 snowmen

[Rayney]

Japanese build 12,379 snowmen
February 14, 2003

A JAPANESE civic committee has claimed a world record for a cool 12,379 snowmen built by tourists and residents of the northern Japanese city of Sapporo and it will seek to register it with Guinness World Records.

"We are happy and proud of the record," said Kazuiku Morita, head of Sapporo hotel association, which helped to organise the 19-day snowman-making event.

Sapporo is the capital of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, 800km north of Tokyo, which hosts an annual Snow Festival of ice sculptures by private groups and government agencies.

"We tried the same thing last year, but we only managed to make 5,538. It was apparently below the current record," Morita said.

The record-holder with 6,300 snowmen is another Japanese city, Tokamachi in the heart of Japan's "snow country" in Niigata Prefecture, 200km north-west of Tokyo, according to the organisers of the Sapporo event.

Sapporo's snowmen were built between January 25 and February 12 as part of Snow Festival.

The organising committee for the snowmen-making record attempt collected photos of all the snowmen as evidence for the Guinness Book of Records, Morita said.

"Next year, we want to break our own record and build 15,000 snowmen," he said.

While the record, if confirmed, may stand for at least a year, the snowmen themselves will not. Most have already been flattened in the clear-up at the end of the Snow Festival on Wednesday and the rest will melt away in the spring thaw.

The Associated Press

[Spießer]

How big were the snow-men?
They can make that record easy if it were small snow-men.

[Shawn]

I was just in Sapporo a couple of weeks ago. I posted some pics at this link:
http://www.discussanything.com/forum...threadid=24546

Scroll down to the last picture, you can see some of the little snowmen that they were building all across the city. They're off to the left in the last photo.