The ``Hirosaki Castle Snow Lantern Festival'' was held on February 9th at Hirosaki Park (Shimoshiroganecho, Hirosaki City).

The event features lanterns and large slides made from snow by Hirosaki citizens, an exhibition of ``HIROSAKI'' snow objects, and projection mapping using large snow sculptures. This year, due to the lack of snow, the event was held on a smaller scale, with the snow object exhibition being postponed.

This year's theme for the heavy snow sculpture is "Hakodate Orthodox Church." We selected Hakodate's representative buildings with the aim of strengthening tourism cooperation between Hirosaki City and Hakodate City. The church is an affiliated cathedral of the Russian Consulate and is known as Japan's first Orthodox church building. The size of the large snow statue is 12 meters wide and 10.5 meters high.

The citizen group that performs projection mapping on the snow statue is the civic group Paya Paya Lab. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the initiative, and Kaoru Kasai, the organization's representative, says, ``We designed it to be a collaboration between Hirosaki's cherry blossoms and kogin sashimi and the Hakodate Orthodox Church.'' Projection time is 5 minutes 30 seconds. Projected every 20 minutes starting at 6pm.

This year, there was so little snow in the park that you could see the ground in some places, and the size of the snow lanterns and snow sculptures were smaller than usual, but from the first day of the event, citizens were seen playing on the slides and enjoying the snow lanterns and other exhibits. There were many.

The event is held from 10:00 to 21:00 (until 20:00 on the last day). free entrance. Until February 12th.