Kawasaki-daishi fertility festival

Me and some friends went to a fertility festival yesterday, that’s supposed to take place each year in Kawasaki. I had heard about it a year earlier and it seamed very strange to me, at that time and I thought this only happens in Japan, and I was probably right. I had seen pictures of it and heard that they were carrying around big hmm… phalluses, and indeed all the rumors were completely true.
We went to a temple in Kawasaki-daishi near the station, which was specially dedicated to a kind of worship of the male genitalia. There were statues of it at the temple ground, which was a very strange sight at first.

I don’t know about how people’s relation to this festival was in the old days, but now however, it seems like people only go there to have a lot of fun. They get drunk in the middle of the day and just sit around and talk. People were selling drinks and candy in the form of… well you can probably guess. Some people played around with the statue. It was quite an amusing sight. It all ended up with us walking back to Kawasaki beside the Tamagawa river at the time of sunset. A beautiful view as a finish to a very nice day.

Metropolis writes about the event from an earlier year, http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyotravel/tokyojapantravel/365/tokyojapantravelinc.htm

and here’s also an video from the festival, http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyotravel/tokyojapantravel/365/tokyojapantravelinc.htm