|
My classmates and I recently made it to the Kanamara Festival in
Kawasaki Japan. The picture above should give you some idea of what
it's about.
| It's held at the Wakiyama Hachiman-gu Shrine close
to the Kawasaki Daishi station. I had directions on how to get
there and I had called the shrine to find out when the festival was
and they also gave me some directions. They basically said to
come to the station, exit and you'll see it across from the station.
Well, we got there, I didn't see anything that looked like a
temple once we got outside the station but we did see a huge facade
over one street that said Daishi Temple so we went that way.
That street was all souvenir shops and so it seemed like maybe we
were going the right way. After a few blocks it made a u-turn
and was clearly approaching a huge temple. |
|
|
|
Just as we got to the temple though my friend
Atsuko called. She lives very close to that area and was going to
meet us there. When I told her where we were she said we had
goofed up and to come back to the station.
It turns out Daishi is an enormous temple in Kawasaki but it is
not the shrine we were looking for. |
The one we were looking for was actually practically directly across
from the station but it was very small and the shrine itself was blocked
by another building so it was not obvious where it was.
| There were 3 main mikoshi which I guess would best
be described as portable shrines. There was the pink one
(top). The black one (to the right) and the tree one
(left). I have no idea what if any differences in meaning
there are for the 3 mikoshi. |
|
Every festival has it's drummers. Click
here to here them play.
According to my friend Atsuko and also a little flyer she found,
originally the shrine was to honor the gods of iron.
There was a iron working building and they were making swords.
But, the history of the area is also that it used to be an area with lots
of brothels and the workers used the temple to pray not to get syphilis
and from that this festival started.
It is now considered good luck, good family etc to embrace one of the
big phalluses or to ride the wooden phallus shaped see-saw.
At some point during the festival the mikoshi are picked up by a bunch
of people and carried down the street through the center of down while
dancing and shaking the mikoshi fairly vigorously. Interestingly,
the pink mikoshi at this festival is carried by a group of drag queens.
|
|
Just as they picked up the last mikoshi to carry
it down the street they did some crazy shaking. Click
here to see a video of it. It actually looks kind of
dangerous to carry these things. They are carried by like 20
to 30 people each and they shake them all over and march down the
street. People do help guide but it's clearly hard to control
30 people like that. I saw a few people get hurt.
Probably got their leg stepped on. |
| Most of them are wearing these cool looking but
not very supportive boot things.
There are also all the candies as you can see below. It is
especially interesting to walk around the festival and see people eating
them all. Of course I picked a bunch up and handed them out to
friends and teachers the next day.
|
|
The first package on the left is individually wrapped crackers.
If you look closely each package has a picture or actually a card with a
picture on it inside.
The pictures look like the ones to the left here. Click
here if you want to see all of them. We all speculated if there
was any purpose to them other than instruction. For example cut them
out, put them in a hat and pick one at random. Or place one on your
lover's pillow before bed etc. We tried to get one of our married
classmates to give it a try with her husband but we couldn't get her to
give it a try. Too bad.
|
