Kanamara Matsuri

The Kanamara Matsuri is an annual Shinto fertility festival fall on the first Sunday in April in Kawasaki, Japan. The penis is the central theme of the event that is reflected everywhere - in illustrations, candy, carved vegetables, decorations, and a mikoshi parade, where a shrine with a giant phallus is carried around.

This Shinto Penis Festival in Japan is a big event with 30,000 thousand participants who pray to the sexuality gods for protection from sexually transmitted diseases, business prosperity family prosperity, easy delivery, marriage, and harmony between married couples.

The festival Kanamara Matsuri may look very shocking to people outside Japan. But before the rise of religions and doctrines like Christianity, Islam and Confucianism they were commonplace throughout the world. In ancient Greece and Rome before Christianity they had the Dionysus and Bacchus Festivals that celebrated sexuality. Sex and religion were closely linked in other religions like in the Tantra, a Hindu sect and Taoism, an ancient Chinese religion.

Kanamara Festival is named after Kanamara Sama, or Lord Iron Penis. The festival dates back to the 17th century when Kawasaki was a station town along the Tokaido Road.

The festival, which has been held since the 1600s, centers around the legend of a demon that hid inside the vagina of a young girl and castrated two young men on their wedding nights. In retaliation, the young damsel sought the assistance of a blacksmith, who in turn built an iron penis to combat the demon. This led the Shinto people—Shinto is a form of spirituality practiced by over 90% of Japan’s citizens—to build a giant penis shrine that prostitutes would visit to seek protection from STDs. In due time, the shrine became portable and thus a festival was born.

The Kanamara Matsuri festival features a plethora of penis-related items like penis-shaped candies, penis-shaped candles, penis-shaped food,

both for young

and for old.

This is a festival totally devoted to the penis, a tradition that was carried on for centuries.