Japan’s Celebration of the Penis
The phallus, penis, dick, prick, cock, member, shaft, pecker, peter, tool, putz, or in other words, the male sexual organ, is celebrated in Japan’s Kanamara Festival as a symbol of fertility. To us Westerners, this sounds pretty strange, since we’ve all been brought up to keep our sexuality in our pants and in the back of our minds. The Japanese, it seems, are much more liberal about it. The Kanamara Festival is most famous for a giant consecrated shrine of a penis, which is carried through the town. MSN Mainichi Daily News writes:
Revelers also watched mostly young women sit atop huge wooden penises made as Shinto totems, each woman sparking a rapid-fire succession of camera flashes from the dozens of mostly middle-aged men armed with digital cameras.
Megadem’s Flickr photostream has some good illustrations of the shrine, genitalia candy, the large model phalluses:
If you want to know the history of this festival, I suggest Metropolis:
Sexually transmitted diseases spurred the popularization of phallic symbols in some of Japan’s festivals dedicated to the male member, such as this one dating back to the Edo period (1603-1867). At that time, Kawasaki’s “ladies of the night” prayed not only that business would be brisk, but for protection from syphilis.
Wikipedia suggests another origin:
There’s also a legend of a demon that hid inside a young girl and castrated two young men on their wedding nights before a blacksmith fashioned an iron phallus that was used to break the demon’s teeth, leading to the enshrinement of the item.
Just remember–in Japan, this is a family safe festival. I write this for my mother, who will definitely wince when she sees a post celebrating any kind of sexual organ…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 5:48 pm and is tagged with flickr photostream, male sexual organ, kanamara festival, penis dick, symbol of fertility, wedding nights, phallic symbols, phalluses, ladies of the night, camera flashes, male member, wikipedia, digital cameras, edo period, phallus, revelers, shinto, rapid fire, penises, westerners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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