"SOBETSUCHO, Japan -- On winter evenings, men gather outside a hotel in Japan's frozen north to heat snow with an oil stove in a vinyl tent. When the powdery stuff becomes malleable, they shovel it into a mold resembling a giant cupcake tray, and stamp out 1,000 perfectly round snowballs of regulation size: no less than 2.56 inches in diameter and no more than 2.76 inches.

For the next three hours, they throw these snowballs at one another, hoping to recapture the title their team, now called Skyward, won in 2001: the Showa Shinzan International Yukigassen, the de facto world snowball-fight championship."