I've just made an eye popping discovery not very long ago. Kanamara Matsuri, also known as the festival of the Steel Phallus* is an annual Shinto fertility festival held in Kawasaki, Japan in spring. It has no exact date, but the main events usually fall on Sunday. The penis forms the central theme of the event that can be illustrated everywhere; be it a candy, decorations, parades and vegetables.

The Kanamara Matsuri is centered around a local penis-venerating* shrine, once popular among prostitutes who wished to pray for protection against sexually transmitted diseases. Also, a legend has it that a demon that hid inside a young girl and castrated two young men on their wedding nights before a blacksmith fashioned an iron phallus that was used to break the demon's teeth, leading to the enshrinement of the item.

* phallus - an erect penis, to a penis-shaped object such as a dildo, or to a mimetic image of an erect penis.

* venerating - a religious symbolic act giving honor to someone by honoring an image of that person (in this case, an object)




So there you have it. An enlightening rare post on a foreign culture, specially on "http://cheeze-addict.blogspot.com"