#NerdsUnite: Around the world with @HeatherReusz (festival of the steel phallus)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Heather. She's a nerd who is currently living in Japan by way of Chicago. Yep, talk about a culture shock. She's here today to talk about her life, love (which she is currently balancing long distance) and all things nerd. I only have one more thing left to say ... HIT IT HEATHER!!!</editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @HeatherReusz
I ventured into the weird side of Japan this weekend. About four weeks ago, my friend sent a cryptic facebook message to me and some of our other friends asking if we wanted some dick in our lives. Intrigued, we responded back to her to please explain what she meant. She had found a fertility festival being celebrated about an hour from where I live and wanted to know if we were interested in joining her.
The festival is called Kanamara Matsuri which literally means the “festival of the steel phallus”. It is exactly what you think it is. This shrine has a ton of statues of genitalia in all mediums but the show stealer is a giant steel pink penis. The shrine has been a place where prostitutes would pray for protection from STDs. There are also talismans that you can buy for happy marriage and childbearing.
Now a days, the festival is pretty much just a large tourist grab for the city of Kawasaki. Although, the transgendered and gay community in Japan has also taken this festival under their wings as a platform for AIDS awareness. The main event of the festival is a large parade where the largest of the penis statues gets taken around the city to the shrine. There are also a lot of guys in drag who follow the penis through the streets as a gay pride parade of sorts. We, unfortunately, got there only to witness the end of the parade as we got a late start since the majority of my group of friends had been out all night the night before, myself included. That’s just what happens when the trains stop running at midnight and you don’t even leave work until 8PM.
As soon as we arrived, it was pretty evident that this was a tourist attraction. There were foreigners EVERYWHERE which is pretty rare to see outside of Tokyo and Kyoto. It was also pretty evident that a large portion of this festival also involved being staggeringly drunk at 2 in the afternoon. We kind of felt like we were at some kind of twisted St. Patrick’s Day party or back in America at a frat party. It was actually a bit jarring at first since we’re not too used to having other foreigners around us. Not wanting to ruin the atmosphere, we grabbed some drinks.
There was a lot going on in a small space. There were people dressed in drag and even a couple of people walking around in daylight in sexual costumes. We talked to one guy who was dressed up as a human blow-up doll and another who was covered head to toe in black latex. I really enjoyed seeing a whole group of men in drag sitting under a tree having a picnic. It’s totally amazing that they can find a place to express themselves like that in Japan. The majority of the stands were food stalls. The biggest selling item being lollipops shaped like dicks. We didn’t get one as the line was almost an hour wait. We did end up eating “Mighty Penis Balls” which were just takoyaki, fried dough balls with octopus in it. Other vendors sold merchandise like carved wooden genitalia or the Japanese karma sutra in playing cards or on hand towels. Our favorite stand was a cloth maker who hid penises in all of his designs.
After getting some more sake, we wandered around the temple admiring all of the penises and vaginas that were around us. After a couple of more drinks we even got the courage up touch them and take a couple of obligatory inappropriate pictures. It was actually much smaller than we had imagined. We had seen the whole shrine in about 45 mins. We stuck around though because the atmosphere was amazing.
Often times in Japan, people are kind of repressed. A saying here is “The nail the sticks up, gets hammered down.” Basically meaning that people are expected to act a certain way and when those standards aren’t met, they are shunned. It can be really stressful to always have to be thinking about fitting in and following the rules. Events like this where people are free to be themselves and let loose can be rare to find. We tried to stay and enjoy it for as long as possible. People were super friendly. We met a lot of new people. Even though they were drunk, we enjoyed the company and the ability to just laugh and be loud in public together. It was a great experience! We got to do some day drinking, hang out with new people, and touched a giant pink penis. Makes for a pretty great story.