Junichi Nakamura has long had a reputation for pushing the limit with his ice sculptures. The first time I met him, in Canada in 1996, he and his teammate were busy creating a sculpture that I was sure would fall down. (It didn’t!) In 2008, at the World Ice Art Championships, his four man team created a sculpture that looked certain to collapse when the support struts were removed (It did!) The most popular ice sculpting video on YouTube shows his “Birth of the Blue Bird” sculpture crashing down around him after he removes the last safety strut back in 2005. (As of this writing, the video is posted at the bottom of the ice carving secrets homepage and on Junichi’s photo page.)

    This year at the World Ice Art Championships was no different: one of the most anticipated events was the final moments of carving “Attacking Claws,” when Junichi would cut away the last support ice and the crowd would get to see how well he had calculated. The sculpture depicted a huge lioness clawing at a leaping wildebeest (or gnu). It appeared that the odds were against him; the unsupported weight of the wildebeest trying to get away from the lioness looked like it would certainly fall to the ground without the support strut. However, Junichi had a trick up his sleeve, one that he’d used before, but for other reasons.

notice the dotted lines in the body of the gnu, indicating the ice to be hollowed out in this design schematic

    In 2007, at the Championships, Junichi and his team were carving a goldfish sculpture titled Aqua Queen. This sculpture required that a number of the massive Alaskan ice blocks be welded together, carved, and then the whole assembly lifted as one piece and set on its base. Normally, the combined weight of the structure would be more than Ice Alaska’s boom lifts could handle. But Junichi sent teammate (and current Olympic ice carving champ) Ben Rand into the belly of the beast, directing him to hollow out the goldfish to lighten it up. So that Ben didn’t accidentally carve away too much, they drilled small holes in from the outside and put a chopstick in each hole. When Ben got to the end of the chopstick, he would stop removing ice.

    This year, Junichi used the hollowing trick to lighten the wildebeest. Instead of making a lift possible, the hollowing allowed the sculpture to support the massive suspended body of the wildebeest. Before, the top piece of ice was added, Junichi and his teammates carefully removed a lot of ice from the inside of the sculpture, resulting in a piece that would appear impossible to even experienced ice sculptors! If you look carefully at the design posted above, you can see dotted lines that indicate the ice to be removed.

Junichi and a teammate work at hollowing out the wildebeest

Shinichi Sawamura and a teammate carefully move scaffolding away from the finished sculpture.

(Keen observers will notice the faint lines in the body of the gnu where the sculpture was hollowed out.)

    Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. Why did I title this entry “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your ice down!”? Because, according to Dick Brickley and Steve Iverson of Ice Alaska, “Attacking Claws” finally did come down. The wildebeest collapsed, just as it looked like it should, leaving the lioness perched above a pile of ice rubble. (I’m hoping for a picture later; anybody who has one, please let me know!) Why did it finally collapse? Because one of the Ice Alaska volunteers was blowing recently fallen snow off of it! Nobody touched it; the pressure of the blown air was the straw that broke the camel’s (or wildebeest’s) back! This illustrates just how razor thin Junichi’s margin of error was for this piece!

Junichi’s team, including Shinichi Sawamura, Kyoichi Yoshikawa, and Kareki Koj, pose in front of the finished sculpture,

which won 2nd place (realistic category) at this year’s Championships. It’s not surprising that they’re posing for photos

at some distance from this extremely daring sculpture!