Male Bondage

So, I went to view my prefecture's most famous festival, the Hadaka Matsuri or Naked Man. On a cold night in February each year, thousands of men flock to the temple to don nothing but a sumo-like diaper arrangement (and this is no ordinary diaper, it is ten feet of white cloth twisted into what has been described as the ATOMIC wedgie, a wedgie so powerful you can taste), run several times through a chest deep 'cleansing lake,' consume enough sake to make the whole affair seem somewhat sane, and then fight over a large stick dropped into the crowd by a priest to win a year of good luck.

Several JET English teachers from other prefectures came in for the event, and we all took three buses to the temple grounds. One bus was filled with a bunch of guys who actually running to try to win the stick for the foreign community, but there was no way the Japanese yakuza (mob) was going to let that happen.

It was a flesh colored sea punctuated by black dots of hair with countless arms and legs undulating like tentacles. An eerie mist of steam rose above the mass along with the noises of drunken effort and struggle. If you were watching closely, the lines of men parading in groups seemed to pass by three times before they ended up dissolving into the sea. Rinse and repeat this image for an hour until your mental picture is filled to the brim with these naked men. Cry out as large waves of men fall down the steep stairs of the temple. Think, 'That must have hurt' after the tenth times, then you'll get used to it. Finally the lights go out and large sticks are being dropped into the mass, but you can't see them. For the rest of the ceremony, you will never see the stick, this is disappointing and unsatisfying to you. For the most part, it is anti-climatic because the mass post-stick doesn't look much different to the mass pre-stick. And it isn't until you leave the temple and see grown men wandering the streets in diapers, alone and cold that the metaphor of a womb for the mass comes to mind, that all these men were inside something wet, warm, possibly very gooey, and they are now ejected back out into the cold hard world with nothing but a soggy diaper, some colorful bruises, and an empty hand where a triumphant stick should have been.