Text & video by Phoebe Amoroso, cover image courtesy of Kanamara Shrine
Our roving reporter, Pheebz, visited the annual Kanamara Festival on April 7th, which involves a lot of phalluses. The Kanamara Shrine (literally, “Metal Penis Shrine”) is where people pray for sexual health and fertility.
The annual festival – informally known as “penis festival” – has been growing in popularity, with 30,000 visitors in 2016, 60% of those coming from overseas. Could watching the phallic parade be something of a release?
What’s the story behind this upstanding event? Watch the video below to peel back the mythological foreskin and get to the root of the matter.
The festival has its roots in local sex workers praying for protection against sexually-transmitted infections, but in recent years, it has come to represent LGBTQ and diversity with profits going towards HIV research.
Quite rightly, however, many have pointed out the hypocrisy inherent in a country, which made international headlines for condemning vagina art by Megumi Igarashi, better known as Rokudenashiko. Who was arrested on obscenity charges for distributing 3D data of her vagina that she used to 3D print a vagina canoe as part of her work.
Yet the obscenity of the flagrant double standards provokes discussion, and an event that promotes inclusivity is worth celebrating in a notoriously conservative society.
Many festival attendees are likely satisfied with pure spectatorship and sucking on phallic-shaped candy, and that’s fine too. But for maximum enjoyment, it’s worth digging a little deeper into the legend of a SAVAGE VAGINA DEMON (you read that right).
One legend has it that a beautiful woman was plagued by a jealous demon, who hid in her vagina and killed Husband Number 1 by biting off his penis. Husband Number 2 met a similar fate. Dismayed, she enlisted the help of a local blacksmith who seems to have been really chill about dealing with vagina demons. He made her a metal phallus, which she inserted. The demon, of course, bit it, but he broke his teeth and fled. Presumably she lived happily ever after, especially since she had her own personal metal phallus.
Come along for the ride – watch our report. ↑
An excellent (and expensive) study of such sexual imagery in Japan is Japan’s Sexual Gods by Stephen Turnbull. He covers the use of female genital imagery which is found in several areas. He also points out that such images of both genders are protectors against evil such as disease and bad luck.