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.”
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
RSS