Japanese men strip off for annual naked festival
OKAYAMA ( Japan): With only a skimpy loincloth to protect their modesty, thousands of men brave freezing temperatures to fight for lucky charms thrown by a priest at Japan’s annual Naked Man Festival.
A writhing mass of sweaty worshippers wrestled for elbow-room inside Saidaiji Temple in Okayama, western Japan, late on Saturday night in the hope of catching the sacred batons.
Around 10,000 hardy souls celebrating the religious festival stepped under ice-cold fountains to purify their bodies before risking life and limb in a mysterious ceremony dating back some 500 years.
“It can get very rough,” 62-yearold auto mechanic Kazuhiko Nishigami said, bare-chested and ready to rumble.
“You have to write down your blood type on a form and tuck it into your loincloth in case you get seriously hurt.”
Most who took on the ‘ Hadaka Matsuri,’ or Naked Festival, suffered no more than a few bumps and bruises after scrapping over a pair of wooden sticks, measuring 4cm in diameter and 20cm in length, believed to bring good fortune to whoever catches them.
But revellers have been crushed to death in the past in a melee that makes Tokyo’s infamous rush-hour trains look like a walk in the park.
And it’s easy to see how fatalities could occur when the lights suddenly go off and priests cast the mystical charms from the temple’s rafters into the heaving crowd below.
As holy water was splashed from above, camera flashes illuminated the sea of bodies like disco lights at a rave – before all hell broke loose.
In a scene reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, steam rises as thousands of