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For 364 days of the year, Wakiyama Hachiman-gu is a small, unprepossessing Shinto shrine in the rusting industrial Japanese city of Kawasaki. But for a few hours every spring it's transformed into something resembling a bacchanalian frat party. And, like most frat parties, it's not for the prudish.
Even for those who manage to ignore the grown men shouldering giant wooden phalluses through the streets, and the elderly women munching odd-shaped sweets that might get them arrested in less tolerant parts of the world, there's just no avoiding that two-metre pink penis bobbing up and down among the crowd of drag queens.
This is the Kanamara Matsuri, a Shinto-based fertility festival dating back hundreds of years that was originally established as a way to pray for the resolution of sexual problems - including a deadly syphilis outbreak among Kawasaki's prostitutes - but which is better known now as a left-field attraction in Tokyo's alternative guidebooks.
The guidebooks say kanamara means 'metal penis' and is named after the Shinto god of the same name. Japan is a country where sex and religion coexist more comfortably than in many Christian societies. 'Shinto is traditionally non-judgmental in the matter of individual sexual behaviour,' says the shrine's chief priest Hirohiko Nakamura.
Not surprisingly, the event attracts one of the most mixed and colourful crowds in this sometimes drab metropolis. Young couples hoping the festival will sprinkle some fertility fairy dust on their childless marriages mingle with gays, pensioners, tourists and children, who spend most of the day trying to straddle the sort of seesaw you don't often see in school playgrounds.