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the iron penises to petition the shrine’s gods for babies or<br />
cures to venereal disease. All shrines in Japan have festivals,<br />
and Kanayama-jinja is no different, but its Jibeta festival certainly<br />
is. In fact, it’s about as wild and pagan as they get.<br />
People of all ages participate in a parade in which most of the<br />
participants sport a gigantic penis, and a massive lingam is<br />
carried through the streets. Females ride a penis-shaped seesaw,<br />
and men, women, and children get their pictures taken<br />
embracing a phallic statue. You can also buy penis-shaped<br />
candies or dress up as your favorite cartoon character with<br />
one part of his anatomy dramatically enlarged. The whole<br />
thing is presided over by a priest, and arcane Shinto rituals<br />
are carried out, as well.<br />
The festival is said to celebrate the vanquishing of a demon<br />
that lived in a woman’s vagina and would bite off the penises<br />
of her lovers. According to legend, a local craftsman fashioned<br />
a steel phallus which broke the demon’s teeth. In the<br />
Edo period, courtesans would come to pray for good business<br />
and protection from sexually transmitted diseases, and<br />
today it is used to promote AIDS awareness and safe sex.<br />
Tagata Shrine<br />
The Tagata shrine, in a small town called Komaki in central<br />
Japan, is ancient Japan’s answer to Viagra.<br />
There are so many hard penises here that anyone<br />
needing a little inspiration in the erectile<br />
department would be well-advised to visit this<br />
odd place of worship. Everything from the<br />
shrine’s bell to the candy in the souvenir shop is shaped like a<br />
penis, particularly in the main building, which houses dozens<br />
of long, wooden phalluses as objects of worship. The Tagata<br />
shrine is dedicated to Mitoshi-no-kami, the god of the rice harvest,<br />
and Tamahine-no-Mikoto, a fertility goddess. The shrine<br />
also has a large collection of stones that look like sex organs,<br />
with two famous round rocks that represent testicles.<br />
Every year on March 15, the Tagata Jinja is home to the<br />
Hounen Matsuri, or Bountiful Year Festival, an old, local<br />
spring festival that has grown to attract tens of thousands of<br />
visitors. Like the Kanamara Matsuri, this festival is all about<br />
penises, and the main object of worship is a giant, two-and-ahalf-meter<br />
long, 620-pound phallus that is carried through the<br />
streets by a team of 42-year-old men (42 is considered an unlucky<br />
age for men in Japan). There’s also free beer and sake<br />
for everyone who attends the festival, and although the bilingual<br />
pamphlet given out by organizers describes the Hounen<br />
Matsuri as a “solemn occasion,” it never is. The highlight of<br />
the festival is supposed to be the giant penis, but for many<br />
people, it’s the sight of their 40-year-old housewife neighbor<br />
dressed in a kimono, cradling a meter-long penis in her arms<br />
like a loaf of French bread.<br />
Festivals like this one used to take place all over Japan, but<br />
unfortunately the Kanamara and Hounen festivals are the last<br />
of their kind.<br />
Last Chance to See?<br />
Japan’s sex museums are becoming less and less common,<br />
and fertility shrines and festivals are increasingly being toned<br />
down. After Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early<br />
1990s, attendance rates at most museums fell off, partly because<br />
people had less money to spend and partly because<br />
the novelty had worn off. Japan is famously faddish, and sex<br />
museums have become passé. A hihoukan closes every few<br />
years, and what was once a score is now a dozen. The ones<br />
that survive receive few tourists, and the exhibits get more<br />
dilapidated every year.<br />
Fertility festivals, while still popular, are being changed gradually,<br />
with penises being converted into spears or obelisks,<br />
and nudity being covered up. It’s been happening since Japan<br />
modernized in the late nineteenth century and changed Shinto’s<br />
focus from ancestors and fertility to emperor worship.<br />
Even worse were the terrible air raids of the Second World<br />
War; a great number of these shrines were destroyed and<br />
not rebuilt. After WWII, many local governments took steps<br />
Everything from the shrine’s bell to<br />
the candy in the souvenir shop is<br />
shaped like a penis.<br />
to ban surviving festivals because they felt that they hurt<br />
their town’s image or made their community look backwards.<br />
Even in places where festivals have survived, local tourist associations<br />
try to keep word from getting out and are taking<br />
them out of their brochures. In short, the more Westernized<br />
Japan becomes, the more difficult it is to find sex museums<br />
and fertility festivals out in the open, so if you want to see<br />
one, book your tickets soon. Here are a few addresses of the<br />
more famous museums and festivals:<br />
• Ome Kamisama Hihoukan – Tokushima prefecture, Awa-gun, Awa-cho, Jionooka<br />
143-8, Tel. 0883-35-2634<br />
• Atami Hihoukan - Shizuoka prefecture, Atami city, Wadahama Minami-cho<br />
10-1. Tel. 0557-83-5572<br />
• Hokkaido Hihoukan – Hokkaido, Sapporo city, Minami-ku, Jozankei Onsen<br />
Higashi 2-103-1, Tel. 011-598-4141<br />
• Ganso Kokusai Hihoukan – Mie prefecture, Watarai-gun, Tamashiro-cho,<br />
Seko 345, Tel. 0596-25-1251<br />
• Beppu Hihoukan – Oita prefecture, Beppu city, Shibuyu Kannawa 338-3,<br />
Tel. 0977-66-8790<br />
• Kanayama-jinja – Kanagawa prefecture, Kawasaki city, Kawasaki ward, Daishi<br />
Eki-mae 2-13-16<br />
• Tagata Jinja – Tagata-cho 152, Komaki City, Aichi-ken. Tel. 0568 76 2906<br />
THE HOUSE OF SECRET TREASURES 81
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