Phallic Fertility Festival Fun at the Honen Matsuri / Penis Festival!

Lets face it, to many outsiders, Japan is a crazy country that does everything a little different, has futuristic technology, interesting food, adult cartoons and an abundance of weird fetishes. Whilst these are often exaggerated massively or are incredibly niche. Certain events or sights here can sometimes fit the stereotypes perfectly. Sex sells, we all know that so the 'fertility festival' is now often lovingly referred to as 'The Penis Festival'.
豊年祭り Honen Matsuri is a Japanese fertility festival that is held on March 15th every year in Nagoya prefecture at the Tagata Shrine in Komaki. Honen means 'Proposerous year' whereas 'Matsuri' means festival in Japanese. The aim is to celebrate  the blessings of bountiful harvest and prosperity and fertility. It sure as hell beats the can drives we used to have at school. Penis over canned corn any day!

Tagata Shrine

Early morning preparations

The festival starts with celebration and preparation at 10:00 a.m. at Tagata Jinja, where all sorts of foods and souvenirs (mostly phallus-shaped or related) are sold. You can see various carts full of charms and sake barrels being pulled by high spirited (literally) festival volunteers. They even had a big pushing war, blue vs red, just outside the gates which was fun to watch.
Inside the temple grounds you can find the usual festival variety of food stalls ranging from castella, to takoyaki, grilled meats and fish and so on. Accompanied by toy stalls and games etc for the kids. However since I was still feeling fragile from a night of St. Patricks day celebrations the night before I refrained from the treats...for now.

We trekked to the outer shrine, which is up a steep hill beyond the train tracks. At the top is a small temple, Shinmai sha, and beside it was the star of the show, a 280 kg (620 pound), 2.5 meter (96 inch)-long wooden phallus. If its your dream to take a selfie with a gargantuan dick like the girls below, here is your best chance. This phallus is later used for the 'climax' of the ceremony, as it is later carried down the hill to Tagata Shrine, but at that point it is swarmed by crowds. Here it was nice and quiet and people took turns to have their photo taken. There was a wall of photographers snapping away, especially so whenever a foreigner walked up!

Before the parade you can take photos at the smaller shrine with the main penis

 I also found this awesome flag nearby, by far my happiest photo of the day!

My favourite photo of the day, to scale.

AvidyaJP having a stroke with Taurinensis

 Speaking of foreigners, outside of places like Roppongi in Tokyo or Amemura in Osaka, this was by far the largest concentration of non Japanese that I have encountered in Japan. Far outweighing the national percentage, obviously attracted by the unusual chance to celebrate the D. While most were pleasant and respectful there is sadly a recognizable percentage that give a bad reputation for everyone who are loud, drunk, rowdy or just saying really ignorant comments. Plenty of exceptions though, so if you go, please respect the local customs, especially around the temple areas.

The queue to buy these banana and marshmallow dicks was, ahem, massive.

 Past noon I was feeling a little better so with another blog friend Taurinensis of Identity Gaming and his wife we queued up to get some バナチン Banachin, Bana as in bana and chin as in penis. In case you are wondering, the marshmallows act as balls. I wish I had taken a photo of the line for this because it was huge! The popularity of this stall far outweighed the neighboring food stalls that I almost felt sorry for them. For 400 yen you can obtain your very own banana penis which comes in 4 different flavours. We opted for the black chocolate ones as they looked the most authentic and 'dickesque'!

4 flavours available, including snowbitten blue dicks.

Wildly popular バナチン banana dick!

 It was pretty amusing to be walking around and seeing men, women, boys and girls alike nibbling, sucking and eating on various penis shaped bananas, candies and desserts. We couldn't resist taking a few photos ourselves although it is pretty embarrassing to do whilst a crowd of onlookers is staring at you!

Taurinensis and AvidyaJp enjoying the D

Taurinensis and AvidyaJP REALLY enjoying the D

Even I couldn't resist a sexy selfie

At 2 p.m. the parade to the Tagata Shrine started, the giant wooden penis is carried by volunteers followed by a chanting tengu and lead by chanting priests. Beautiful maidens also carry 60cm long wooden phalluses and were proving to be incredibly popular, sadly I missed my chance to take some photos for myself! Musicians were also playing tradition gaguku music. Festival volunteers also hand out various snacks and free sake to the crowd. As the phallus reaches the shrine, things get a bit crazy as the penis is span and paraded around wildly, much to the crowds pleasure! See the video below to watch the penis spinning in action!

After the penis is set down everyone gathers in the square outside Tagata Jinja and waits for the mochi nage, where rice cakes are thrown down from raised platforms by shrine officials, if you catch one it is meant to give you good luck. Sadly this is where some of the rowdy foreigners raised their heads. Often there is only enough for around 1 person out of 4 to collect a rice cake, whilst most Japanese would stand still and try to catch the cakes, some foreigners would sadly push and shove each other to get one. Later you could see some foreigners clutching 4-7 cakes for themselves and shoving them into bags, so again, if you go to the dick festival, don't be a dick yourself, there are enough on show already! The festival concludes at about 4:30 p.m.

Overall it was a nice experience, although to be honest I felt that it was a little overhyped considering how far away it is from Central Nagoya. I was expecting phalluses to be everywhere with an abundance of stalls selling related goods. In reality however there are only two small sites that display the festival items and only a couple of stalls actually selling penis shaped goods. So it was a little underwhelming initially.
But you can deny that seeing a unique festival like this is really cool, especially when you see the impressive wood carvings up close and is a great excuse to enjoy the festival spirit. If you have a chance I highly recommend it, you don't get an opportunity like this often!

The 'climax' of the Matsuri sees the penis being carried and spun.