Hanazono Lights Up The Summer Nights

Hanazono Resort is enhancing and expanding its nighttime attractions for this year’s green season.

For the third year running Hanazono will host its Mountain Lights installation, with 180,000 individual points of lights stretching for 1.3km from the foot of Mount Annupuri, as well as fireworks, fire dances and traditional Ainu dances.

Eri Shibuya, Niseko Hanazono Resort Marketing Assistant Manager, said that this year Mountain Lights will have two new features. “Moon Bloom” is an art installation of 1,000 spheres of light that shift among a variety of colours and “Prismatic Spring” is a hanging installation of 69 colour-changing lights.

Shibuya san also said that fireworks, held from July to September, will happen multiple times a month, more than twice as often as last year.

Another Hanazono event that is expanding this green season is last year’s Mountain Lights and Fire Goddess Performance, which took place two times last September.

The event, which is a collaboration of fireworks, a fire dance, and a traditional Ainu dance with an Ainu bamboo mouth harp accompaniment, will be held several times this season.

The additions and expansions of Hanazono’s nighttime summer attractions reflects the larger push at Hanazono, and Niseko on the whole, to provide entertainment during the green season.

The Niseko Area Mountain Bike Association (NAMBA), which opened its first trail, “Twin Peaks”, last September, will reopen the route on 1 June and expand its trails throughout the season.

And this green season is the first to begin since Niseko Real Estate began selling villa plots at its Niseko Golf Estates development last summer, which is located right outside Hirafu and is the first such project to focus primarily on a green season activity.

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