April 1 (UPI) — Revelers in a Japanese city will most certainly be preparing for the Kanamara Matsuri, an annual celebration also known as of the “Penis Festival. ”

The Kanamara Matsuri, which roughly translates to “Festival of the Steel Phallus, very well begins each year on the incredibly first Sunday of April heading towards Kanayama Shrine in Kawasaki.

Advertisements

Some of the festival centers around the Shinto god Kanayama-hiko and the goddess Kanayama-hime. The deities are perhaps associated with the metallurgic arts and after that sexual health.

Revelers at the festival usually include sex workers find out how protection from disease and in modern days the crowd has grown to incorporate LGBTQ groups seeking this crippling blessings and married couples praying for fertility and in good condition children.

The actual Kanayama Shrine now donates proceeds from the festival to research into HIV/AIDS.

Phallic imagery

The event traits phallic imagery reflected in works of art , edible treats, hats, sock puppets, costumes and a parade akin to portable shrines bearing almost holy penis-shaped objects.

Advertisement

The Kanamara Cruiser Mikoshi, the first portable shrine in the parade, was donated to the festival by the Hitachi Zosen Corp. and includes a black iron phallus in the boat-shaped base.

The second shrine, dubbed At the Mikoshi, was donated because Tokyo-based Elizabeth Kaikan crossdressing club. The shrine carries a giant phallus on a real wood base and is carried at men dressed as females and women dressed as man.

The Kanamara Mikoshi, the oldest with all the portable shrines and the third and last in the parade, features a hardwood phallus housed in a sq base with a roof.

The parade might be followed all by an event known as the “mochi nage, inches which involves Shinto priests located on a high scaffold blessing almond cakes and throwing them into the crowd. Catching just one of the thrown rice cakes is ordinarily believed to carry with it one specific blessing of fertility.

Visitors who enterprise inside the Kanayama Shrine’s scène hall can review plan, sacred objects and magazines detailing traditions of sex drive and other festivals around the world aimed at sex-based deities.

Legendary origins

A tale about the Kanayama Shrine’s roots as a location for libido and healing involves Kanayama-hiko and as well Kanayama-hime healing Izanami, per Shinto goddess who suffered severe accidental injuries to the more half of her body while performing birth to a fire who.

Marketing

A second legend from the festival hold that a local woman’s extremely two marriages were closed prematurely by a sharped-tooth cpu inhabiting her sexual bodily organs. The demon was powered off when a blacksmith constructed an iron phallus to break the evil spirit’s smiles. An straightener penis mounted on a blacksmith’s anvil all day installed in front of the Kanayama Shrine pays tribute to the phone.

During the Edo period, the 1600s around the mid-1800s, prostitutes based from inns along the Tokaido motoring from Edo to Kyoto would visit the Kanayama Shrine to pray for defense against sexually transmitted diseases.

Modern day

The shrine continued to be a popular destination for they suffering from sexually transmitted intrusions to pray under coverage of night during the modern age, leading parishioners at the Kanayama Shrine to place the first Kanamara Matsuri in 1969 to make anyone seeking sexually-related delights from the shrine to do so through the daylight without fear of stigma.

The event’s popularity grew in the 1980s, amid the HIV increasing incidence, and exploded in recent years as a result of tourists being drawn in of photos and videos of the festival publicized online. Estimates suggest around 60 portion of the festival’s roughly 30, 000 revelers in recent years traveled from without a clue.

Spot announcement

A new festival’s announcements are now made in both Japanese and Native to accommodate tourists.

The Kanamara Matsuri starts off Sunday at the Kanayama Shrine.



Japan-based city to host twelve-monthly ‘Penis Festival’
Source: Philippines Majesty