Synopsis: Shinto, Sex, Shunga and Ecocrisis

Passion: A shunga of a woman in sexual ecstasy

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一家に
遊女もねたり
萩と月

hitotsuya ni
yûjo mo netari
hagi to tsuki

Under the same roof
Prostitutes were sleeping—
The moon and clover

Matsuo Bashô (松尾芭蕉)
Bashô may have made this incident up, but it is a famous scene in Oku no Hosomichi...

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Having finally left Japan, we have a few insights on Japanese culture, from development and eco-consciousness, to sex, spirituality and life energies.

To complete the relationship between Shinto, life energies, fertility and sexuality, here come three examples of sexually explicit Shinto shrines. These illustrate the fact that Shinto as a fertility religion was naturally sexual until Puritan influences in the Meiji restoration led to the suppression of the overtly sexual elements, despite the yin-yang male and female guardian animals that protect every shrine, the manifest sexual fertility of Shinto goddesses and the implicit sexuality of the Shinto demon Tengu (see later pic). Shinto which comes from Shin-tao or the Tao or way of the gods is implicitly Taoist in nature.

The iron penis carried in its portable shrine Hounen Matsuri,
Tagata jinja, Komaki worshipping the ancestral
woman-goddess Tamahime-no-mikoto.

The pictures are from internet images, Hounen Matsuri at Tagata jinja Komaki north of Nagoya in March and the Kanamara Matsuri rite at Kanayama jinja, Kawasaki in April. The iron penis rite originates from a town of the old Tokaido road, which had a profitable trade in prostitution, and the iron penis was said to destroy the bite of a demon in the vagina of women, that we would associate with an STD. Consequently the shrine is devoted to penis images.

• Video of Tagata Festival
• Video of Kanamara festival

What of the vagina? On display in the Tagata shrine's museum, is a small statue, where, in a wooden case with two swinging doors, is a life-size brass model of a vagina, centered between the stumps of two spreading legs, particularly polished around the orifice. For five hundred yen, you can buy a tiny golden penis charm and rub it on the vagina shrine for good fertility luck. Other Shinto shrines such as the Kangi shrine in Shirahama-cho, Wakayama, have both penises and vaginas as fertility shrines which you can rub.

Penis and vagina shrine totems Kangi shrine.

The matsuri participants carry these penises through the streets with other multifarous manifestations of the penis in trinkets and icons carried by women which the onlookers can rub for good luck, amid frenzied rejoicing and partaking of penis and vagina shaped delicacies.

Penis totem being carried from the Kanayama jinja
in the Kanamara Matsuri by men who are
cross-dressed in the manner of a Kabuki play

A third Shinto shrine renowned for its sexual imagery is the Taga shrine at Uwajima in Shikoku, which is one of the few remaining places where the explicit Shinto sexuality before the Meiji restoration remains. This again has a penis carrying festival and a world sexual museum capitalizing on its unusual reputation.

The Taga shrine at Uwajima has a penis log carried in festivals
as well as various other penis images in stone and wood
and has an adjacent world sexual museum.

In addition to his appearance in many Shinto rites and at Buddhist mountain temples, Tengu is also paired with the goddess of mirth, Otafuku, the breast dimpled female figure paired with Tengu on the love hotel in a previous posting in this blog, in a spring wakening rite at the Asuka Onda Festival, held the first Sunday in February every year at the Asukaniimasu Shrine in Asuka-mura, Nara in which there is an ecstatic simulated sex act between Tengu and Otafuku played by two males in costume, whose origins run back to the 7th century and are some of the oldest in Shinto's long history.

 Mara Kannon Shrine in Tawarayama, northern Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Another part of the exploration of Japanese sexuality involves shunga, the erotic art associated with 'pillow books' for sex education of newly weds, which forms a physical Karma sutra of Japanese sexual positions, as well as group and lesbian sex, and other forms of voyeurism such as bestiality and sado-masochism, illustrating that nothing is new under the Sun.

Shunga: Woman on top and back to front

Sexual elements are also portrayed in sculpture in small ivories depicting sexual engagement and other images, from food to phallic deities. There is a museum of the sex gods Seishin no Yakata in Utsunomiya, Tochigi. Dosojin or wayside protector gods are also sometimes portrayed as a couple, occasionally surmounted by a glans-like shape, or in suggestive, or explicit penile form. A museum containing some penile dosojin from the Dosojin matsuri at Utsugushi-ga-hara Onsen is beside Matsumoto castle.

Dosojin or road-side guardians

In mythological Shinto tradition, the universe begins with both yin and yang attributes forming a diffuse cosmic egg out of which heaven differentiated more easily but the eart was more troubled with chaotic confusion. A tale of Genesis depicts an original couple who walked along a heavenly Rainbow Bridge, thrusting a "jewel spear of heaven" into the chaos beneath. Foam from the spear formed an island, and the couple floated down upon this and built a house with the spear becoming the central pillar supporting the household. Their marriage gave birth to the Kami Islands of the gods, trees, plants, grasses, sun and moon goddesses, and others.

Commercial ivory carving of common rear entry coitus position

The final observation is about the relatively advanced way in which Japan is taking expensive measures to build a sustainable society that is eco-friendly and manages the land of Japan in a sustainable green paradigm. Japan contrasts wildly from colonial agricultural countries such as New Zealand in that 76% of the land area is in forest, despite the extensive urban development, and the remain areas are carefully intensively managed rice paddies and horticultural plots for vegetables. Extensive pasture farming is a novelty, so for confined to Hokkaido and the plateaus at the top of some high hill country.

Tengu's eagle beak has become a distinctly sexual penis nose

The ecosystems thus remain relatively intact, although Japanese demand for wood and other raw materials has devastated the tropical forests of Indonesia and the wider Asian tropics. Japan is also extensively into recycling to the extent there is no trash collection as such but everything is either plastic bottles, metal especially aluminum cans, paper, or 'combustible'. However until China recently overtook it Japan was the world's second largest consumer of oil.

Japan is also heading into demographic crisis with an inverting population pyramid.

Efficient careful land use in Japan.
Tea plantations, rice paddies and extensive forest cover

Protecting the environment has some negatives, like sealing off many of the parking bays on highways, partly to avid accidents but also to prevent desperate Japanese for dumping wholesale garbage in disused corners of the highway system, but it serves as a lesson to other agricultural and industrial countries that it is possible to remain economically robust and have a clean urban technological society as well.