F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-065
Kongōji Kanayama Shrine Festival (Fertility Ritual of Kai City)
金剛地金山神社祭典こんごうじかなやまじんじゃさいてん
At a small village shrine in Kai City's Utsunoya district on the northern edge of the Kōfu Basin, an annual festival has been conducted since the Kan'ei period (1741–1744) that centres on the veneration of natural stones whose shapes evoke the male and female reproductive organs. The Kanayama Shrine enshrines two deities — Kanayama-hiko-no-Mikoto, the kami of metalworking and mining, and Sarutahiko-no-Mikoto — alongside the natural stone objects whose forms the community has historically regarded as sacred vessels of procreative power. Each January 28th, parishioners (ujiko) of the shrine prepare rice-flour offerings (shinsen) moulded into phallic and yonic forms, which are boiled and presented at the altar with sweet bean paste. The festival was designated an Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Kai City on October 2, 2002, a recognition that situates it within the long tradition of fertility and reproductive-blessing shrines distributed across Japan — including the Tagata Shrine Hōnen Festival of Aichi Prefecture and the road-deity (dōsojin) tradition of the Chūbu mountain communities — while acknowledging its distinct character as a ceremony centred on naturally formed sacred stones rather than carved objects.
H I G H L I G H T S
Highlights
- 01The veneration of naturally formed stones as reproductive sacred objects — rather than the carved phallic and yonic forms found at larger fertility shrines — places the Kanayama Shrine ritual within the tradition of yorishiro faith: the attribution of sacred presence to natural objects that human perception recognises as theologically meaningful, a belief system of considerable antiquity in Japanese religious culture.
- 02The preparation and presentation of rice-flour reproductive-form offerings (shinsen) as a community act connects the ceremony to the domestic and agrarian dimensions of Japanese fertility religion, in which food-preparation and sacred offering are continuous acts rather than separate domains.
- 03Designated an Intangible Folk Cultural Property by Kai City in 2002, the festival represents a formally recognised example of the reproductive-blessing (ōmukashi) ceremonial tradition in a local-scale setting, illustrating how a ceremony of national folkloric significance can be transmitted in a small community shrine environment for nearly three centuries.
D E E P D I V E