George Box presents ... Honen Matsuri: the Japanese Penis Festival *

* Courtesy of David Ehrenstein & Bill Reed
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George Box * Self-Portrait

How could we have missed it? March 15 was Penis Day in Japan . Here are the photos. The actual festival is called Honen Matsuri. Celebrated every March 15 in Komaki, a town about 45 minutes north of Nagoya , Japan , this is the time of year where folks haul out a large wooden penis to give three cheers to fertility and renewal. The custom is an old one that is connected to bringing about a good harvest and having babies.


Yamasa Institute Tagata Jinja
Hounen Matsuri @ Fastrider.net
Hounen Matsuri @ Wikipedia


'The ceremony begins at Tagata Jinja with some preparations and drinking of sake. Based on the discovery of an ancient sword and other artifacts, Tagata Shrine is thought to be over 1,500 years old. There are a number of interesting items around the shrine, stone and woodcarvings, manmade or naturally occuring that, of course, are all of the phallus-shape. The main attraction of Tagata Shrine is "the big one". Every year a new phallus is carved from a single cedar tree trunk. In the middle of winter, a tree is cut down and brought to the shrine for purification. Then a master craftsman using traditional tools and wearing ritually-purified clothing slowly carves the tree trunk to be a giant phallus that will be featured in the parade that year. After that year's Hounen Matsuri is finished, the giant phallus is stored here.

'Before the procession can begin, special rites must be performed, prayers must be said, and the participants have to get good and drunk. All the men who carry the large wooden penis are 42 years old. An age which is thought to be unlucky and, like the women aged 36, requires spiritual labors such as carrying a gigantic phallus through the streets of one's town. It takes 60 men working in alternating shifts to deliver this offering to Tagata Shrine. The 8-foot long phallus by itself weighs in at 280 kg (620 pounds), but inside it's wooden palanquin.. together they weigh an astounding 400 kg (885 pounds). The appearance of the phallus changes a bit from year to year. Sometimes it is very smooth and some years it is carved with many veins. It has also grown larger over the years.' -- Fastrider.net



Ceremony & Parade



























Souvenirs & Snacks





















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About George Box

George Box is a visual artist and performer. He appeared in Andy Milligan's infamous cult horror film 'Torture Garden', and, under the name Rocky Box, he was a frequent performer in the early theater works of Charles Ludlum, including 'Turds in Hell', Ludlum's legendary adaptation of 'Satyricon'.

http://www.gallerynow.com/box/

from Bill Reed's Early Plastic (Cellar Door Books, 2000):

Early one evening, shortly after moving to New York City in 1962 and finally gathering the courage to walk to and from the subway, at 12th Street and Avenue B I espied a tavern that looked like something straight out of San Francisco's 19th century Barbary Coast. I pressed my nose up against its frosted and etched glass windows to discover the interior fittings were also the genuine article. But the rest of what I saw wasn't.

Instead of a few stragglers from the neighborhood stopped off for a beer on the way home from work, Stanley's Bar was packed with an ethnically heterogeneous, mixed race, overwhelmingly male clientele, almost none of whom looked like they'd just returned from a hard day at the office. Investigating further, I had barely finished downing my first martini---the only mixed drink I knew how to ask for up till then---when the person seated beside me at the bar struck up a conversation. She turned out to be a folk singer, Sue Hoover, with some eye-opening, dog-eat-dog tales about the folk music racket---especially about Joan Baez. More small talk ensued before I was invited by Sue to join some just-arrived friends seated at a nearby table. One of them was a fairly well-known Australian journalist/rock critic, Lillian Roxon. I was impressed. I said I was a writer, too. Inasmuch as I'd published regularly in my hometown paper, the Charleston [West Virginia] Gazette, that was the truth. Up until that moment, however, I had never much thought of myself in those terms.

Later that night I departed with George Box, an amiable, good-looking fellow about my age. Going back to his house, we smoked a joint (my first ever) and partook of some hot male-to-male action. Afterward he told me how Lillian had acted as trystmaker: "Oh, you could get him in five seconds. Go introduce yourself."

Thirty-five years later [now forty-five] George and I remain friends. Even if you don't happen to make sexual contact like George & I did that night, cruising, as utopianist/educator Paul Goodman once observed, gives you something to do during those long layovers at airports.

The socio-decadological period known as The Sixties didn't really begin until the drugs kicked in big time during the middle of the decacde and continued well into the Seventies. The received wisdom is that if you can substantially recollect the who, why, where, what, and when of those volatile times, you really weren't a part of it. But I remember a lot (it helps that I kept diaries). There are lapses, however: after Janis Joplin died in 1970, George was surprised I couldn't recall having known her. Recently he e-mailed me more details: "Janis arrived in New York with her girl friend Linda en group with Ken Hill [a mutual friend of George's and mine] on his return from San Francisco. She was painfully shy, had acne and sat in front of the juke box at Charlie's Bar on Avenue A just listening to every song and singing along for hours, never saying boo to anybody." This was before she'd turned pro. While I recall Charlie's, a kind of gay(er) Stanley's, Janis still eludes me---even with the assist of George's memory prompt. Eventually she went on to develop a public persona that no one---no matter how ripped on drugs---could forget.
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p.s. Hey. My major thanks to distinguished local David Ehrenstein and honorary d.l. Bill Reed for ferrying me today's post of posts. Give it your all today, if you will. As I explained yesterday, I'm sans the ability to interact with you today seeing as how I am at this very minute riding a train from Belfort to Paris whereupon I will meet and greet you in my fairly usual style tomorrow. I'm writing this in the middle of yesterday's afternoon during a short break from testing various holographic possibilities, and so I don't have a lot to tell you that would inch the narrative of my situation any further into the future. Presumably I will have news or something by the time I see you next. Take care, and thanks for your kind attention and for any comments you decide to leave in the meantime. Later.