The Hodare Matsuri

"The wha?" I hear you say!!

Hodare matsuri, translated as the Penis Festival is quite the unique festival in Japan. Perhaps unique TO Japan for that matter!Hodare in English is 'male genitals', but if the characters are written in hiragana, the meaning then becomes 'the ripening of rice plants'.
Every year on the second Sunday of March the locals of Shimoraiden, a wee mountain village near Nagaoka City get together to show some love to a large wooden penis, 2.2m in length, and which weighs 600kg. The religious belief and tradition being that those who pray to or touch the symbol ensure a happy marriage, fertility, healthy children, and the good life!

So we rocked up to the show at about 11.30 after a lengthy trek from Niitsu that morning. The snow was pelting down as the K-cars struggled up the mountain. In one car there were sounds of "Oh, look, the trees are beautiful." "Aren't they? Today would be great for boarding" "Isn't everything feckin gorgeous when its covered in a blanket of snow". (Ros, Jenelle and Pam)At the same time, not so very far away from the other K-car came "Frikkin hell man, whats with all the snow? Its frikkin Spring already", "This sucks, are we there yet?", "These things had better be worth it, ya'll" (Natasha, Kristen and Johanna).

So our trekkin wasn't quite finished when we got there as we had to park a bit of a way away from the actual shrine which meant that five of the six of us had to plod through the snow in our runners aka sneakers aka trainers (!!!!) So the , moral of the story is, on top of being frozen anyway, we were all now walking around with cold, damp feet and hangovers. Cheery stuff. But the spirits were still bright surprisingly!

Well we hadn't been there long until we made some friends. Oh yes, the festival was working its magic already. Two somewhat elderly, drunk Japanese men decided that we were the order of the day and they would stop at nothing to get out attention.

It started off with chivalry, and the nice gesture of holding an umbrella over us. Good move. They had us. The next move was "guess the country" when the two of them simultaneously launched "America, England, Scotland.." etc at us with the hope of impressing us with their geographical knowlegde. From there, I was offered some magic potion for my fertility... Japanese sake with a dead fish floating in it. It looked dodgy, but what the hell...I'll try anything once. So from there on, we skipped a million bases and I had the Japanese dude with the brolly grab my arm with one hand and his crotch with the other while he yelled "SYMBOL.... PANIS!" at me. Then frightening the crap out of me, with same hand, he took a dart for my nether regions!!!!Eh steady on there old man, but I'm taken ;) and I also had my band of highly trained killing machine ALTs watching my back. lol

The paparrazzi were also out in full force that day and it didn't matter what we did, there was a picture taken. One guy in particular took a bit of a shine to Johanna and I, so we decided to get our own back (see below!)

They say that if the festival was stopped, misfortune would cripple the local people. Now we couldn't have that, could we? So us being the do-gooder gaijin folk that we are, we made sure that the show went on!! What a laugh! and what a day!

Thanks girls xxx