Hokkaido Highway Blues

the country’s greatest strengths.
    The only disturbing part of this ritual (if you happen to be male) is when these same demure women fold up the slips of paper their fortunes are printed on and then wedge them into the wood-grain of the phallus. The phallus has dozens of these paper slips jammed into it like acupuncture needles, some of them in areas so sensitive that it causes me to double over in sympathetic pain even now.
    Taga Shrine is not lurid, it’s rather subdued. Granted, the lily-pad ponds were decorated with stone penises, but tastefully. The land the shrine is built upon was first consecrated seventeen hundred years ago. And although none of the original structures have survived, the present shrine is still so old its origins have been lost. In fact, Taga is referred to as both a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist temple, syncretic not by design, but through the blurring of borders. Like the union of man and woman, the point of contact between Buddhism and Shinto is a bit messy and you can’t really tell what belongs to whom.
    The mythology traces it back to Izanami, the archetypal goddess who died giving birth to fire. Transformed by death into a Goddess of Destruction, she roared out, “I shall kill a thousand lives a day.” To this, the God of Life replied, “If you must. But know this: I will give birth to one thousand five hundred lives a day, and I will win.”
    They call Taga “The Shrine of One Thousand Five Hundred Lives.” It rejuvenates worshippers, it cures illnesses, it helps married women get pregnant and pregnant women give birth. They come to pray at the stalk of life: the penis, from which life is transferred from man to woman to world. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so strange.
    Sex is religion, philosophy, morals, science, life. This is the creed of Taga Shrine, and it was here that the first Taga priest was spiritually awakened to the principal of opposites in union. And thus began his quest: to seek and find and gather symbols of this vital life principle.
    Which brings us to the museum. The museum, beside the understated calm of Taga Shrine, is a three-story box of a building, circa 1974: Disco Architecture. Appropriately enough, it is dedicated to sex.
    I’m not sure what I expected. Soft lights, red wallpaper, sitar music, wafting incense, maybe an instructional diagram or two. Who knows, I thought, as I paid the exorbitant entrance fee (I have long since passed the point of caring about costs in Japan; I just open my wallet and let them loot it of whatever arbitrary amount they decide upon), I might even pick up a few pointers.
    It was nothing but neurotic clutter, a novelty-cum-oddity shop lit in sickly green fluorescent and crammed to the corners with every sexual image you can imagine, and then some. It smelled uncomfortably of sour milk. Walking through it was like creeping through the attic of some sex-crazed ferret.
    This has been going on for generations. The sex collection has been passed down from father to son, and the physiognomy of the current priest/curator fits perfectly with his occupation. He has a thin face, slicked-down hair parted on the side, heavy-rimmed glasses, and beads of sweat permanently affixed to his upper lip. His father started it all and was, in a way, the Doctor Livingstone of Japanese sexual exploration. He traveled the world, tromping among the hill tribes of long-necked Thai women, canoeing through Papua, New Guinea, and hacking his way through the Amazon rain forests. He ranged the African savanna. He roamed the Persian plains. He even—and here’s the scary part—visited Soho. And instead of T-shirts and postcards, our intrepid adventurer brought back stone vulvas, phallic fetishes, and wooden sex totems. Do you think the people at Japanese Customs were getting a little tired of this guy? “Anything to declare?”
    “ Well, just this seven-foot stone vagina.”
    It was all jumbled together. The walls and the corridors, the stairwells, even the ceilings. Everywhere you looked there was sex, sex, sex. It was inescapable, it was obsessional, it was relentless. It was like being a teenager all over again.
    Blow-up toys, love chairs, marital aids, the complete Kama Sutra, catalogued and unabridged, with positions basic, advanced, and impossible. Peruvian pottery, dolls from Nepal, figurines from Bali, wall hangings from India: endless variations on such a common theme. Leather straps hung like horse harnesses and bondage paraphernalia