Last week I went to a very special festival near Komaki. This festival was the infamous Hounen Matsuri, or Penis festival. Taking the day off work (which, it being the end of the school year, was quite easy to do), I went with my girlfriend to get drunk and eat lots of phallic food. What better way is there to spend a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in mid-March?
I arrived at the station a little before noon looking smug as hell: not only did I not have to come into work today, but I was trying out something I'd always wanted to do since I heard about my placement in Aichi. The station was quite busy (not that you can see it here) and we were buzzing with anticipation.
The road to the shrine was covered in souvenier stands this is a picture of 'his and her's' rock candy lollipops. Unfortunatly, the vagina shaped candy was not made for sucking and broke in two at the slightest pressure. It seems like the patriarchy wins again.
The shrine itself was a fairly standard, if quite large, affair. Perhaps its most distinguishing features were the large number of phallic symbols in the shrine itself. Imagine your fairly typical Church of England church and replace the crucifix with a massive penis, the font with a wang and the organ with...well a different type of organ.
Festivals in Japan often feature bananas dipped in chocolate as a staple snack food. This being the penis festival, a couple of marshmallows were added, along with the tip of an extra banana. Contrary to popular belief the black ones were no bigger than the white ones.
Not just bananas, but hotdogs too. This particular sausage (as modeled by yours truly) was wrapped in a sort of batter and had a stick thrust in it. It was supposed to represent the portable shrine that houses the huge penis that is paraded down the street (more on this later). Naturally the sausage had been circumcised.
As we made our way towards the parade, we started encountering heavy crowds. After fighting our way through the massed revelers, we eventually found the procession at its [ahem] head was this fellow with the long nose. Supposedly the guardian of the shrine, his nose is suitably erect. The most surprising thing about him though is that no-one saw fit to add a couple of balls to the base of his long spear.
Next up in the parade was a flag of...well...you guessed it, another dick. This one was carried by what looked like members of the town's local council or business leaders: wealthy men in rich suits overlaid with gaudy waistcoats and carrying a huge flag with a picture of a cock on it. Somehow this says more about Japan than any guide book could.
This woman was a porn star, at least according to one of the onlookers who recognised her from her movies. All day she walked around in a pink kimono followed by a fat man with a massive camera. Occasionally she would pose with one of the sausages or bananas in a very suggestive fashion whilst her portly colleague would take pictures. Most of the time though she looked a little bored with the whole thing.
The portable shrine itself was a normal portable shrine with a massive penis rammed through the middle it took about twenty men to lift it and they could only do it for a couple of minutes before they had to lay it down and the next team took on their burden. Accompanying the shrine were men and women distributing seaweed and sake and as the procession drew on the sake got more and more generous. By the end most people were very drunk.
This man was one of many such drunks, and made it his mission to kiss me as deeply as he could. Unfortunately for him he did not succeed in kissing me at all. Eventually he stumbled away to talk to one of the police officers and we never saw him again... Other drunks just danced, like the sharply dressed man on the right who boogied on down wearing a strap-on dildo. In the gay future, when gay marriage is legal and all society will crumble leaving the earth to be roamed by nazis riding dinosaurs, this is what bus conductors will look like.
This was probably my favourite thing at the festival, not just for the very pornographic imagery, but because of the censorship. At a festival where they literally ram a giant penis through the doors of the waiting temple, it's still somewhat taboo to show actual sex acts. Even better is how they covered it up; with the cutest picture of Lilo kissing Stitch. I didn't buy it, as it was quite expensive, but I did buy a sake cup shaped like a penis with two matching cups shaped like a penis and a vagina. You have to suck the sake out of the head of the penis cup...
At the end of the day they threw rice cakes from the balcony of the shrine. As big as a fist and as hard as a rock the sky was suddenly filled with flying cakes. If you catch one, it's supposed to bring good luck, but I'm not sure if that's true, as I saw one middle-aged man catch one and almost immediately get hit by a second one, which broke his nose. Some people brought out buckets and baseball gloves which worked well. I was awful, a combination of not having played cricket in over five years (or baseball ever) and being too tall to get on my hands and knees to scramble around in the dirt for them. I did catch one, however, as I pounced on it before the old women could tear it out of my hands.
So that was that: The penis festival of Komaki. The only place you can see a higher concentration of dicks than Goldman Sachs.
