Worship of the Phallus

The Kanamara Festival is dedicated to fertility and the protection against sexual transmitted diseases. It has turned into something quite different…

WARNING: DEPICTIONS OF MALE/FEMALE GENITALIA ARE BELOW. THIS IS CULTURAL AND NOT MEANT TO BE EXPLICITLY SEXUAL BUT SOME READERS MAY NOT WANT TO SEE…

This festival in Kawasaki was featured by the Huffington Post and other media this year. The reason is obvious if you google and see the pictures published. I cannot tell a different story. And I visited the festival with mixed feelings.

The picture shows the two phallus which would be carried around in parade later on. Before this there was of course a shinto ceremony. But the hundreds of people attending did not pay attention. From the start it was all about to have fun, with more or less humor.

The last pictures clearly show the sensational aspect. Three foreign women on a wooden penis and dozens of photographers around it.

But to give a least a brief historical background to the event (excerpt from wikifestivals):
“This religious celebration of the penis has roots in the early 1600s, in the Edo period of Japan. At the time it was a frequent stop for travellers and traders who were close to the capital and to completing their journey. As is typical for these types of towns, many tea houses sprang up to entertain and distract the weary travellers; as can be imagined, tea was not the only thing on offer. The girls that would service the travellers started going to a local Shinto shrine to pray for protection from sexually transmitted diseases, which slowly evolved to become a yearly festival celebration.”

This is the day for big business. Venders sell everything “penis” shaped. Bestsellers are candys in form of male and female genitals.

The shrine itself has numerous phallus statues made out of stone,concrete or iron. Her a woman poses next to the steel penis.

The story to this goes as follows (again from wikifestivals):The tale goes that the innkeeper’s daughter was soon to marry. An evil demon, upon hearing the news, decided to ruin the celebrations by crawling into the girl’s lady parts. Terrified, the girl stayed silent, so that on her wedding night, when her husband tried to consummate the marriage, the demon decided to snack on the poor man’s penis. This happened one more time to another suitor, before an ingenious blacksmith thought up a clever solution. He cast an iron penis, and used it as bait. The demon, thinking he had found another sucker to castrate, bit down sharply, and to his surprise found out that it was made out of metal. The demon fled, hurt and humiliated, and everything ended happily ever after with the girl marrying the blacksmith. To this day, an enormous iron penis is the primary shrine at the Kanamara Matsuri

With the influx of all the tourists the shrine itself is hard to examine. There are a lot of wooden tablets on both sides, on which women wish for example that they will have a healthy child. The young priest does not really look too amused watching the people just having fun..

But let the parade begin ! Three of the portable shrines (mikoshi) will be carried around the streets.

In front of the parade two persons carry flags, followed by a priest (with a long “nose”) and girls who performed dances before at the shrine.

The rest of the pictures just try to cover the parade and picture the excitement of the folks carrying the different mikoshis. The people carrying the pink penis are dressed like transvestites, I was not sure if they really all were..