Two weeks ago, in Kawasaki, a city near Tokyo, was held the Kanamara festival, also known as the “Festival of the Steel Phallus“. I had heard about it a long time ago, when we were living in the Yamanashi prefecture and wanted to find out more about it. So what is that festival anyway? The festival is celebrated at the Kanamara shrine, in Kawasaki. During the Edo period, that area had quite a lot of “tea houses” (i.e. brothels) and local prostitutes used to go to the Kanamara shrine to pray for the protection of the gods against diseases. Later, people started to go to the shrine to pray for fertility, clan’s prosperity, good marriage and married-couple harmony, easy delivery and even business prosperity. Nowadays, it is a very touristic festival and it is being used as a way to bring awareness to sexually transmitted diseases and raise funds. Now, it’s not the most classy festival (quite the opposite actually) but it was worth going once!
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