While beautifully frocked Shinto priests in the shrine celebrate the thousands-year-old god, long worshiped by prostitutes fearing disease and pilgrims worried for their fertility, a different sort of celebration is going on outside, as tens, if not hundreds of thousands of partiers take to the streets. Made of old stone and boasting a small but pretty network of traditional orange torii gates, it was built in roughly 698 CE - but is now more famously home to the festival - in prim and proper Japan, an unusual but charming celebration of the sacred and the profane. The shrine is humble but has stood the test of time. History forgets to mention why she failed to warn the second guy.įinally a third, more determined suitor, a blacksmith, created an iron phallus that broke the demon's teeth the man won over the beautiful woman while the demon presumably returned back to the ether to receive quite the lecture from his orthodontist. Legend holds that a jealous, red-faced, sharped-tooth demon hid in the vagina of a goddess and then bit off, to their great surprise, the penises of her first two husbands.