Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
KAWASAKI, Japan — Sunday’s Kanamara Matsuri saw Kawasaki’s streets throbbing with activity during the annual Festival of the Steel Phallus, a centuries-old Shinto tradition in which worshippers carry three enormous johnson-shaped portable shrines through the streets of Kawasaki as part of the country’s ongoing, but increasingly futile, effort to convince its citizens to make more babies.
The Kanamara Matsuri, which translates roughly to “Festival of the Iron Phallus” (because there is a more specific translation that is not great for a print article) draws tens of thousands of tourists, families, and LGBTQ supporters to the Kanayama Shrine each April, where the deities of fertility, childbirth, and sexually transmitted infections hold jurisdiction over a courtyard dominated by a one-meter black steel thingy that has been standing straight up since the Edo Period.
Yeah, we pixelated it. (Stealth3327/wikimedia)
The festival honors a legendary blacksmith who, during the Edo Period, forged an iron wang to shatter the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon living inside a woman’s hoo-ha that had been castrating men on their wedding nights. This is not allegory. This is Shinto canon. Look, that’s what the legend says, I’m just the messenger. The blacksmith’s workshop is recreated on the shrine grounds, complete with an anvil, presumably for visitors who want to see where a man once hammered out a dong sturdy enough to defeat a genital demon and think, “I should try harder.” Heh. “Harder.”
The three sacred mikoshi paraded through the streets. These include the Kanamara Omikoshi, the oldest and made of wood; the Kanayama Boat Mikoshi, featuring a black iron todger that has been hard for over four centuries; and the Elizabeth Mikoshi, a massive pink dong donated in the 1980s by a drag club in Asakusabashi – because when a Tokyo drag bar gives a shrine an enormous pink dong, you carry it through the streets with pride. Sex workers originally pilgrimaged to the shrine seeking protection from disease, and the festival evolved over the centuries into a broader fertility rite, though “broader fertility rite” still mostly just means an endless parade of dicks.
“I hope the festival can help disabuse people of the notion that sex is a bad, dirty thing,” chief priest Hiroyuki Nakamura told AFP, standing in the shadow of a phallus taller than most of his parishioners. Tourists agreed the event had a wholesome, penetrating energy. Julie Ibach, 58, of San Diego, added that “Everyone is embracing it and making fun of it. You don’t see that anywhere else.” She is correct. You do not.
In February, preliminary data from the health ministry confirmed that Japan’s fertility rate now sits at 1.14 children per woman, nearly half the 2.1 needed for replacement. Deaths exceeded births by nearly 1 million in 2024 alone. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has called the trajectory the nation’s “biggest problem,” which is the kind of thing you say when you have a one-meter iron phallus in a shrine courtyard, a parade of giant dicks through the streets, an entire festival dedicated to the concept of human reproduction, and your citizens are responding by buying the p**** candy but not, apparently, taking the hint.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
