Sawt Falasteen - Revellers parade giant penises to dash stigma in Japan's fertility festival

The spring "Kanamara" celebration near Tokyo features colourfully dressed worshippers carrying a trio of giant phallic shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee.

The festival as legend has it honours a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman's vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights.

Today a three-foot (one-metre) black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of the Kanayama Shrine honouring the Shinto deities of fertility, childbirth and protection from sexually transmitted infections.

Over the centuries, sex workers pilgrimaged to the shrine to seek its powers of protection before the festival evolved into a broader fertility rite seeking to destigmatise sex.

"I hope the festival can help disabuse people of the notion that sex is a bad, dirty thing," Hiroyuki Nakamura, chief priest at a shrine that hosts the festival, told AFP.

In February, preliminary data released by the health ministry showed that Japan's birth rate had fallen for the 10th straight year in 2025.

A total of 705,809 babies were born that year in Japan down 2.1 percent from 2024.

The data includes births to Japanese nationals in Japan, foreign births in Japan and babies born to Japanese nationals overseas.

The open-minded, all-inclusive annual event attracts everyone from tourists to families with children and LGBTQ supporters sporting rainbow outfits.

"It feels like it's more than just ha-ha sex. There's a whole understanding behind it," Jimmy Hsu, 32, a tourist from San Francisco, told AFP, referring to the event's underlying fertility theme.

- 'Everyone is embracing it' -

Despite the penis-themed T-shirts, toys and candies galore, "I think by American standards, this is so wholesome", he said.

The view was echoed by Julie Ibach, 58.

"There was one little boy who had two penis stickers, and he's just going back and forth and we just were laughing," the tourist from San Diego said.

"Everyone is embacing it and making fun of it," she said.

"You don't see that anywhere else."

V.AbuAwwad--SF-PST