Konomiya's Hadaka Festival （国府宮の裸祭り）

On the 4th of Feb., I went to a very famous festival here in Japan.  It's called the Hadaka Festival, but a lot of people refer to it as the "Naked Men's Festival".

The festival took place a little away from Nagoya's main city - it looked like your typical small town / area with no big attraction.  But that day, the trains were packed to go to the shrine area.  Once we left the train area, food stands were side by side, lined up guiding everyone to where the main event would be.

At the shrine, there was two gates a little out of the way from the main road where people was tying red and white pieces of cloth.  On one there were even bags of some.  I assume this is prayers or wishes made by everyone.  The shrine had lines of people waiting to buy these strips of cloths for ￥100.

My friends then went down the road to find food.  The middle road, which I think used to be a garden but now was covered in mud, was separated by the 2 roads on either side.  This is where the naked men participants would walk down.  We managed to find a good spot to watch the procession that was happening.  The naked men, wearing mostly nothing except for a Japanese loincloth (褌) were walking down in groups; probably their families or clans.  They were either showering each other with sake as a purification act, or carrying props like a long slim tree-looking thing or a barrel of sake.  At certain points, they would stop, break open the barrel of sake and share with everyone in bamboo sake cups.  They were yelling in rhythm which kept up the mood of the whole festival.  The men, even though it was noon, looked pretty much drunk.  They would go up to people to either take strips of cloth from people or strip some from their own supply for others.  Super super interesting.  ^_^

Because me friends and I came really early, we decide to leave before the main event.  What we missed was basically all these men who congregated chase down one man (神男?), who would take all the bad luck from the village and purify him.  This man is completely naked, but apparently I missed him when he passed.

It was a really fun experience.  I got to see  a lot of things that I don't normally have the chance to see.  There was a candy making stall, where the owner was skillfully molding a ball of candy on a stick into animals (like a squirrel or a goldfish), fake corn dog stands, and other traditional Japanese food.  Also, there were some foreigners in the naked men's parade, invited I guess from the community (one guy was from Nanzan University!).  It's definitely something to see if you can when you're here.  ^__^