Cock-a-hoop Japanese discard inhibitions
mikoshi, or portable shrines, being paraded through the town. Each mikoshi is carried by dozens of locals outfitted in happi coats and sweatbands, while some of the men are in fundoshi, loincloth-style underwear.
The Kanamara Matsuri is often presented to outsiders as yet another face of “quirky Japan”, but it’s a serious religious affair linked to Japan’s nature-worshipping Shinto religion.
It’s organised by the priests of Kanayama Jinja, a subshrine of the larger Wakamiya Hachimangu that, the rest of the year, is populated almost exclusively by locals. For centuries, Kanayama has been a place where couples pray for fertility and marital harmony; during the Edo era, from the 17th to 19th centuries, sex workers would come and pray to be rid of the STIs that they picked up in the course of the job. There was even a festival revolving around fertility and sexual health during those times but the tradition was lost in the late 1800s. In the 1970s, then-chief priest Hirohiko Nakamura decided to resurrect it.
Early incarnations of the new Kanamara Matsuri were held at night and saw only about a dozen attendees. But since then, the festival has morphed into what it is today: a joyful and blatant celebration of the penis in this usually more circumspect country.
The Japanese aren’t exactly known for broadcasting their sex lives and until recently, the Kanamara Matsuri mostly attracted a smattering of overseas visitors. But five years ago everything changed when it was name-checked by Matsuko Deluxe, a Japanese TV personality known for his cross-dressing and pro-sexuality views. The festival quickly gained domestic followers and today it attracts about 50 000 visitors.
The parade consists of three mikoshi, each containing an enor mous disembodied phallus. The first – ramrod straight and made of shiny black metal – is carried by a troupe of whistling and chanting shrine-bearers, careering from side to side down the street as festival-goers jump out of the way. The second is an old wooden model, ancient and gnarled.
The third is carried by a joso group: members of a cross-dressing club called Elizabeth Kaikan whose members are decked out in bright make-up and colourful wigs as they jiggle the mikoshi in the air, pouting and preening for the cameras.
Although some see the festival as a joke, Kimiko Nakamura, former chief priestess at the shrine, stresses it’s a legitimate event.
“This event has deep, wide roots and we don’t want anybody to take it another way.”
In the procession, people wander by sucking on penisshaped lollipops coloured green, blue, purple and pink. Lots of people have brought small children. One little boy perches on his dad’s shoulders and points to the big pink phallus mikoshi. “Wow, a willy!” he says. “Yeah,” his dad responds. “It’s a big willy.” – The Independent