Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex.
The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee.
The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights.
Photo: AFP
A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of the Kanayama Shrine honoring the Shinto deities of fertility, childbirth and protection from sexually transmitted infections.
Over the centuries, sex workers pilgrimaged to the shrine to seek its powers of protection before the festival evolved into a broader fertility rite seeking to destigmatize sex.
“I hope the festival can help disabuse people of the notion that sex is a bad, dirty thing,” said Hiroyuki Nakamura, chief priest at a shrine that hosts the festival.
Photo: AFP
In February, preliminary data released by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare showed that the nation’s birthrate last year had fallen for the 10th consecutive year.
The open-minded, all-inclusive annual event attracts everyone from tourists to families with children and LGBTQ supporters sporting rainbow outfits.
“It feels like it’s more than just ha-ha sex. There’s a whole understanding behind it,” said Jimmy Hsu, 32, a tourist from San Francisco, referring to the event’s underlying fertility theme.
Photo: AFP
Despite the penis-themed T-shirts, toys and candies galore, “I think by American standards, this is so wholesome,” he said.
The view was echoed by Julie Ibach, 58.
“There was one little boy who had two penis stickers, and he’s just going back and forth, and we just were laughing,” the tourist from San Diego said.
“Everyone is embracing it and making fun of it,” she said. “You don’t see that anywhere else.”
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