SAPPORO -- The 55th Sapporo Snow Festival opened Thursday amid tightened security due to the Iraq dispatch of Self-Defense Forces troops, most of whom are based in Hokkaido.

Organizers said they expect more than 2 million people to visit the annual seven-day event, which features snow and ice sculptures.

Metal detectors have been installed for the first time to check the baggage of visitors to one festival site in the Makomanai district, which is located inside an SDF base.

Surveillance cameras have also been installed at Makomanai and two other festival sites.

At Odori Park in downtown Sapporo, where the main part of the festival is taking place, five large snow statues, including one of New York Yankees slugger Hideki Matsui, and about 200 smaller ice sculptures are on show.

They will be lighted up until 10 p.m. each night.

In terms of size, this year's biggest attraction is a replica of India's most famous architectural monument, the Taj Mahal, standing 15 meters tall and measuring 30 meters in width.

For children, the festival offers snow slides, 12-meter-tall sculptures of dinosaurs as well as characters from popular video games.

Aside from the Taj Mahal, architecture fans can admire replicas of a historic Japanese courthouse and the Renaissance-style City Hall in the German city of Hanover.

Swirling snow in the Hokkaido capital did not deter thousands of tourists, students on school trips, soldiers and residents coming out to see the statues during a preview Wednesday.

"I liked the dinosaurs," said 10-year-old Takahiro Yamashita from Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, who was strolling through the park with his sister and parents. "This festival is fun because we never get snow where we live."

The festival annually brings in about 26.8 billion yen to the regional economy, said Kimihito Nakamura of the organizing committee.

The festival began spontaneously in 1950, when local schoolchildren built six snow statues in Odori Park.

Locally based soldiers later joined in, followed by businesses. They began building and sponsoring massive snow and ice sculptures in the park, along city streets and on a nearby army camp, which was opened to the public during the festival.

This year, the Ground Self-Defense Force mobilized 20,000 soldiers to truck 30,000 tons of snow in from other open spaces in the city, and help build the giant snow statues, an SDF spokesman said.