JapanDo: Kanamara Penis Festival かなまら祭り

Kanamara Penis Festival かなまら祭り is held at a tiny shrine of the same name, Kanamara Jinja 金山神社. It's basically a fertility festival that takes place on the first Sunday of every April. Its popularity has made this small festival extremely crowded.

Just a couple of minutes walk from Keikyu's Kawasaki Daishi Station 川崎大師, the festival starts at 10 am but gets packed with people, with lines around the block. The scheduled ending time is around 4:30 pm. Because it is such a small scale local festival, it doesn't seem to be prepared for all the foreigners flooding the area. There were announcements in English asking if people wanted to join the "masked parade" starting at noon but we left before then because there was just a whole lot of standing around waiting. If you really want to check it out, don't expect too much - we heard that the festival gets more exciting later in the day when the giant phalluses "go for a walk" around the block. There were very small dance and drumming performances, but the local performers were probably not impressed by all the eager giant camera lenses in their faces. The most entertaining thing would probably be people, mostly foreigners, enthusiastically sucking on some very realistic penis-shaped lollipops which you probably would have to line up for a long time to buy.