The Blowfish Blog

Steel Phalluses in Love Land

America has the occasional sex museum and a few high-profile celebrations of sexuality (Folsom Street Fair comes to mind), but as a nation we’re largely repressive amateurs when it comes to the public educational and celebratory aspects of sex. Hell, a lot of people don’t even recognize the symbolic significance of all those eggs and bunnies rolling and hopping around during our spring fertility festival — er, I mean, Easter.

But it’s impossible to miss the sexual gist of Kanamara Matsuri, a Shinto festival held in Kawasaki, Japan every April. The presence of an enormous steel phallus being paraded through the town by transvestites is the tip-off. This “Festival of the Steel Phallus” dates back to the Edo period — so we’re talking at least a couple of hundred years — when prostitutes would visit a local shrine and pray for protection from venereal disease. Now the festival is a fundraising hub for HIV research; the goddess would probably approve. There are penises carved out of radishes, see-saws shaped like penises, and other such delights. According to the Wikipedia article linked above, there’s a myth about a demon hiding inside a woman’s vagina and castrating two men on their wedding nights. The demon was finally driven out after a blacksmith fashioned a giant steel phallus to, ahem, break the demon’s teeth. Doesn’t sound much fun for anyone involved. (And one wonders about the second guy who got castrated . . . you might think he’d have given some credence to the rumors he surely heard about that girl . . .) For more details (and photos) about the festival, check out this entry from the Steve Goes Traveling blog, and this more newsy and informative article from Metropolis.

While we’re marveling at the sexual coolness of Asian countries, I’ll make brief mention of this neat photo story about an erotic garden in Korea. Love Land is a sculpture garden devoted to sex, and some of the sculptures are even interactive. Yeah, that’s right. Wikipedia has more details, and there’s also an official website, if you’re interested in checking the place out firsthand. There’s even a separate play area for the kids! There are also sex-related museums in Japan, and you can read about these Houses of Hidden Treasures at Juergen Specht, along with lots and lots of photos. There oughta be a Lonely Planet guide for this stuff.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 5 September 2007 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Ask Blowfish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.