This year marks a half century for the festival in its modern form. Three, in total, are carried around town two are of metal and one, true to Japan's contemporary anime-loving culture, is of the cheery, bubblegum-hued cartoon variety, and lofted by 18 fellows wearing glitter and fantastic makeup.įor the prudish, it might be hard to see, but it does have its benefits: These days, sales from the festival - penis clothing, candy, food, toys - rake in gobs of money every year, put duly to work toward HIV research. Local families and businesses work for months to make the enormous genitals carried on the shoulders of teams of men through Kawasaki's tight streets. They enjoy them all while snapping not-quite-ready-for-Instagram selfies and watching a parade of all of Kawasaki's manliest men, struggling to carry a bunch of giant junk through the street. Revelers carry penis lollipops (funny to look at, but not particularly tasty), phallic vegetables, and enough whimsical toys to stock a year's worth of Las Vegas bachelorette parties. While beautifully frocked Shinto priests in the shrine celebrate the thousands-year-old god, long worshiped by prostitutes fearing disease and pilgrims worried for their fertility, a different sort of celebration is going on outside, as tens, if not hundreds of thousands of partiers take to the streets. Made of old stone and boasting a small but pretty network of traditional orange torii gates, it was built in roughly 698 CE - but is now more famously home to the festival - in prim and proper Japan, an unusual but charming celebration of the sacred and the profane.

The shrine is humble but has stood the test of time. History forgets to mention why she failed to warn the second guy.įinally a third, more determined suitor, a blacksmith, created an iron phallus that broke the demon's teeth the man won over the beautiful woman while the demon presumably returned back to the ether to receive quite the lecture from his orthodontist. Legend holds that a jealous, red-faced, sharped-tooth demon hid in the vagina of a goddess and then bit off, to their great surprise, the penises of her first two husbands.

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