PENIS!!

Now that I have your attention, I will be talking about penises, or more specifically the "Kawasaki Penis Festival"

Accurately known as the “Kawasaki Daishi Kanamara Festival of the Steel Phallus” is held every year, in the middle of cherry blossom season at a small Shintō shrine just south of Tokyo. It’s quite something —check out photos. The Japanese, while cultivating an image of being demure and refined, certainly don’t go to any half-measures here —“Hey kids, lets pick up Grandma and go down to the Penis Festival to watch some transvestites carry around a huge three-meter wang through the streets!”

Legend has it that long ago, a evil daemon possessed a young woman’s vagina, and set her about town, thusly biting off the sensitive bits of her lovers. (Most unladylike of her if you ask me). The Kawasaki’s menfolk felt a bit irked with this rather unsatisfactory situation, so a blacksmith forged an iron phallus which was then used to break the dæmon’s teeth. The dæmon was vanquished, happiness returned, and the phallus came to be venerated at the local shrine.

The festival itself dates back to the Edo Period (1603-1867). At that time, Kawasaki's "ladies of the night" prayed not only for good business, but also for protection from syphilis (generally a good idea). Come cherry blossom time, they’d gather baskets of bamboo shoots and other sprouting delicacies, carry the shrine's phallic image in procession through the streets, and then sit down to a merry banquet on mats spread out on the courtyard of the shrine.

Today, the highlights of this saucy festival include transvestites in kimonos and bad wigs parading through the town's streets carrying a mikoshi (portable shrine) with a humungous shocking-pink phallus on top, as well as the spectacle of grandmas and little kids sucking on penis-shaped candy. Other attractions include locals carving penises out of daikon radishes, and people sitting astride penis-shaped seesaws for good luck and fertility blessings.

In a word, basically, it was nuts.