Pack your bags and head for Komaki, outside Nagoya, for March 15 is the ‘big penis’ festival when fertility rites are celebrated in the Honen Matsuri at Tagata Jinja. The festival attracts great attention amongst Westerners, because of the celebration of something considered taboo or unsavory. As the late great Alan Watts put it, no other religion in human history has been as obsessed with sex as Christianity. By contrast, bearing a phallus around on a mikoshi shows acceptance of nature’s way and a desire to cultivate the life-force.
Once Japan was covered in phallic representations, and border markers known as dosojin depicted sexual imagery including copulation. Encouraging fertility in crops was crucial to a nation whose whole tax-paying system was based on rice bushels. With the Meiji Restoration, however, there came a desire to be seen in the eyes of the West as advanced and ‘civilised’. (Confucian moralists had already clamped down on the ‘primitive’ displays.) Accordingly, most of the representations were done away with and rituals cleaned up. Some, however, survive.
For a report on tomorrow’s festival, please click here. There’s also a Wikipedia page here.
Phallus worship at Yaegaki Shrine in Shimane
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