S P O T ／ SPOT-002

Ōagata Shrine (Vulva Shrine)

大縣神社おおあがたじんじゃ

If Tagata Shrine is Japan's yin, Ōagata Shrine is its yang — or rather the reverse: the feminine counterpart in one of the world's most candid pairs of fertility shrines. While Tagata worships the phallus, Ōagata venerates the feminine principle through its spring Hime-no-Miya Festival (also known irreverently as the Ososo Matsuri), held annually on March 15th — the same day and in the same general area as Tagata's Hōnen Festival. The parade's centerpiece is a pink, peach-shaped portable shrine, and visitors are offered pink yōkan sweets shaped in the same unmistakable motif. The double-billing with Tagata on the same date makes this area around Inuyama a uniquely concentrated zone of ancient Japanese sexual symbolism — what scholars call the "yin-yang twin festival circuit," where ancient agrarian fertility worship survives intact into the Instagram age. Inuyama itself is the heartland of the Momotarō (Peach Boy) folk legend, adding mythological layers to the shrine's peach iconography. The grounds are lined with peach-shaped ema votive plaques, and the shrine's famous plum grove reaches full bloom precisely in time for the spring festival. Coming here after Tagata is less of an afterthought and more of a completion — two halves of an ancient cosmological equation.