"Fertility" Festival

We took a day off school to visit the very famous Hounensai festival near Nagoya. For centuries, the shinto priests there have carved an enormous new phallus each year out of a freshly chopped cypress tree. The whole town throngs with phallus paraphernalia - phallus candy, chocolate-coated (and lovingly shaped) bananas, phallus prayer books, and so on. There's a fun-filled procession from one shrine to another, replete with maidens bearing phalluses of their own. And Fiona was forcibly seized by one of the officials and made to pose with the biggest phallus of them all; the cameras went mad as a blond blue-eyed gaijin kissed the star of the show.
(To view a Japanese TV news report, including token interviews with gaijin, click here.)