On the little
Japanese island of
Shikoku, in a little town
called
Uwajima, is a little but somewhat famous
Shinto shrine called
Taga Jinja (多賀神社).
This means something the lines of
"many congratulations", which is a small hint that the place is
an ancient
fertility shrine. A bigger hint, in the form of
a two-meter long wooden
phallus complete with intricately carved
bulging veins and a sculpted
glans, sits in the temple's courtyard.
But the reason most tourists come these days is a drab concrete box
of a building that largely dwarfs the wooden shrine next to it.
This building is dubbed the Dekoboko Shindô (凸凹神堂),
which, if translated fully literally, would mean the Convex-Concave
God Hall. In case this is too oblique, the shrine's mon
(logo) makes things clearer by placing the kanji for a convex pointy bit
凸 underneath so that it sticks up into the concave hole bit 凹, the end
result looking like this:
#############
#############
### ###
### ### ###
### ### ###
###
#############
#############
Get it? I knew you could! So basically, the hall is a
sex museum
featuring
pornography from all over the world, not much different from
the ones in places like Amsterdam and Berlin. Entrance
costs a relatively steep ¥800, which really is a bit much given
that it's not much bigger than the free operation at the
Big Iron Penis Shrine down in
Kawasaki.
But there is one excellent reason to trek down to the museum shop:
why not buy some ¥300 Yin-Yang Harmony Fortunes
(陰陽和合おみくじ) as souvenirs for the folks back home? After all,
a normal Japanese temple fortune contains little more than
horoscope-style advice, while Yin-Yang Harmony Fortunes will reveal
all about the size of your sexual organs and how good you are in
bed, also giving you an overall ranking based on those in sumo.
Who wouldn't want to be a mighty yokozuna?
But alas, we can't all be insatiable stallions, and to illustrate
here's an authentic example that might have crushed an ego less
gargantuan than mine:
前頭6
男の方:小まら
女の方:ふくれ
取り組:はな息の、出るとき抜いて、くいつかれ。
Maegashira (5th and lowest rank in sumo), number 6 (out of 16)
Male: "Small Penis"
Female: "Bulging"
Match Results: "When the breath comes out the nose, one can eat no more."
That was the literal reading, but of course there's more to it than that:
hanaiki means both "nasal breath" and "a person's pleasure"
(yes,
Japanese euphemisms are weird)
and the rest puns on that,
so what it really means is something along the lines of
"
comes once and
can't get it up again". Ouch.
But no worries if you can't quite hack Japanese puns, since the
fortune also includes a little clay figure graphically illustrating the
union described above -- which, for the above case, meant a little toothpick
buried in vast folds of flesh. Yipe.
Getting There
First you'll have to get yourself to
Uwajima, a non-trivial
exercise in itself. It's a couple of hours south of
Matsuyama by
train or bus, and you'll also pass through if you're doing the
Shikoku loop (along the
88 Temple Circuit, mayhaps?) and are
coming up from or going to
Cape Ashizuri.
But assuming you've landed at the train station, stop by at the
nearby tourist office, get yourself a map of town, and ask the
staff to point out the shrine because none of the English literature
on offer even mentions the place. (There is a semi-discreet
Japanese pamphlet, complete with map, available though.)
Then head north towards the big landmark of Warei Shrine:
once you've crossed the river and reached the steps of the shrine,
turn left. The shrine is a few hundred meters ahead, look out
for the little signs attached to the lampposts.
References
Personal experience
Lonely Planet Japan, 7th ed.