The next morning we got ready and vacated the hostel. We were on our way to a city outside of Tokyo called Kawasaki for a Penis Festival!!
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| Manhole cover of Kawasaki. |
We rode the train for about a half hour to get there, and the entire town was packed! It was here that we met up with my friend, Gabe. There were super dense crowds as far as the eye could see. And I am pretty sure there were more foreigners attending this festival than there were Japanese people.
We saw a huge line of people that wrapped around the entire block to get into the shrine grounds. We followed it to the end, realized that there was no way in hell we were going to wait in this line and set out to find a different way. We found it really easy, there was a second entrance to the shrine about 100 feet from the main shrine entrance. It was still crazy busy, but at least we had a fighting chance of making it into the shrine. As we made our way closer and closer to the entrance, we saw that the main part of the festival was starting, the part where they parade two giant penis statues through the streets. Cormac lifted me up on his shoulders and I snapped a bunch of pictures.
The story behind this festival is that long ago there was a demon who fell in love with a beautiful woman. He loved her so much that he had to be inside her forever, so he possessed her again and lived inside.
The woman got married to a local man. On the night of their wedding when they consummated the marriage, the demon bit off the penis of her husband, and he bled out and died. The woman mourned the loss of her husband but did her best to keep living her life.
The woman later got married again, and the same thing happened.
The woman was so upset at this point that she decided that enough was enough. She went to the local Shinto priests and told them of her predicament. They made a penis out of steel and when they inserted it into her the demon bit it, broke all his teeth and died.
This festival is to celebrate that story by celebrating penises. They do this with metal penises, giant penises, wood penises and pictures of penises. It is quite an interesting and unique festival.
One thing you can buy is candy shaped like penises or candy that has pictures of penises. When I arrived they had sold out of penis suckers, so I was a bit disappointed, but I bought some hard candy with penises and aginas pictured on them.
When I returned to Minamisoma, my friend Rihanna had an extra and gave it to me. She went to the festival with her mother, and I didn’t see her there.
Here is a picture from one of my friends who also went, their group were able to buy penis candies.
After the penises were out of the shrine grounds and being paraded through the streets, people started leaving. This gave us our opportunity to get inside the shrine grounds and check everything out.
This is the shrine:
And one more:
This is the building where you hang your ema from the shrine along with the ema that people have drawn pictures on themselves.
It also had this metal penis attached to an anvil on the ground underneath the ema. It is said that if you touch it, you will be blessed with fertility.
There were some tables selling penis candies and candles nearby.
There was also this giant metal penis on the grounds.
After we saw most all there was to see we headed back towards the train station. It was then that we saw down a side street the two penises that were being paraded through the streets along with the carriage that held the two people playing the priests and the beautiful woman.
We followed them for a short while, and turned back to the train station. We rode the train back into the city. We got off at Shibuya station where we showed Darragh the Hachiko statue.
This is the statue of a famous dog from long ago named Hachiko. The story is that a man, Professor Ueno, walked with Hachiko to the train station every day on his way to work in the 1920’s. The dog would walk home by himself and return to the station alone at the precise time Ueno’s train arrived and they would return home together. One day Ueno walked with Hachiko to the station, but he suffered a brain hemorrhage at work and died. The dog waited for him at the station for the rest of his life, for over nine years. When Hachiko died he was buried with Professor Ueno.
It is a sad story, and now there is a statue and a mural of Hachiko at Shibuya station.
In the intersection of the main road near the Hachiko statue I found a Toynbee tile in the road! If you don't know about the Toynbee tiles, I recommend you go look them up. It is a fascinating story!
We waked a few minutes away and went to a conveyor belt sushi place, but this one was different, you ordered what you wanted and they would deliver it on a remote control plate on the track, but it was not a real conveyor belt sushi experience.
After eating our fill we went to Yoyogi Park. We went there to pick up one of my friends, Matt, who was in need of a ride back to Fukushima City. We entered the park on the east side, and my friend was at a hanami part on the west side. We thought it would be easy to reach him, but that was not the case, there were no paths cutting through the park, so we ended up walking north through the park, eventually making our way to the north east exit of the park and walking down the west side of the park because we didn’t know of a better way.
We walked along the main path going north at first and ran into this wall of sake barrels. They have a bunch of different designs on them because the come from different breweries.
We also happened upon a Shinto Shrine in the middle of the park called Meiji Jingu.
On the grounds of Meiji Jingu there were these two trees that were connected by a holy rope and the sign said that the trees were married.
All in all we walked around Yoyogi Park for over an hour, and it was nice and entertaining, but I was also pretty tired by the time we found Matt.
We stayed and talked with the people at his hanami part for about twenty minutes, then Matt picked up his stuff and we made our way to the train station where we rode a train all the way out to Kashiwa, where we all piled into my car and drove back to Fukushima. Conversation in the car was so much fun, we joked and told stories and listened to music for the nearly 4-hour drive back. It was such a great time. I then drove back to Minamisoma.
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