**WARNING: This post may contain scenes which are not suitable for those who are adverse to large phallic sculptures**

The Penis Shrine.

An acquaintance of mine, a lady by the name of Mayumi who works as a receptionist at city hall, wanted to take me and Brett on a road trip. Accompanying us was Izumi, Mayumi's friend. The four of us had gone out for dinner once before while Tola was visiting over winter holidays.

According to Mayumi, there are only two such "fertility" shrines in all of Japan. I've completely forgotten the Japanese name for the place so I can't check to verify if this is true or not. Let's say it is.

Basically, hidden away in some random corner of very rural Yamaguchi, there is a small little wooden shrine containing hundreds of penis sculptures, most of them to scale. Some, as you can see from the pictures below, are quite prodigious.

I'm guessing these are the wishes/prayers of past visitors to the shrine ("Please grant us a baby. Let it be a girl and let her have Zhang Ziyi's face").

Izumi: "Well, I came all this way, I might as well touch it." If you look closely, the tip of this particular member has been rubbed to a shiney sheen from countless people touching it for good luck.
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I read the English translation of the legend of this shrine and it didn't seem to be connected in any way to fertility or penises. Essentially, some dude a long time ago did something bad in his village. He was run out of the village and was given over to mob justice. He managed to escape and later in his life, he erected (I beg your pardon) this little shrine, for some reason. The only connection I can see, if I read between the lines, is that the man might have been the victim of a John Bobbitt-like fate at the hands of the mob, and thus, later in life, wished he could have kids, or something. Anyways, the story I just recounted above is probably not accurate at all, it's going on some very fuzzy memory-work.

The reason why my memory is fuzzy is because Brett and I spent most of our collective energy that day trying not to throw up in the backseat of Mayumi's car. We spent an agonizing 5 hours, round trip, in that hell. This is something that has stricken both Brett and I ONLY in Yamaguchi, Japan. The likely reason is that the mountainous terrain of Yamaguchi makes for very windy and hilly roads. Combine that with the fact that for some reason, the Japanese drivers I've ridden with have very twitchy gas/brake feet, and you've got a fail-proof recipe for car-sickness.

I, through some deep-breathing mediation, managed to master my nausea, but Brett was in bad shape. I joked to him that the fertility shrine must be really potent (ha!) because he's already experiencing morning sickness!* He kept it together through a superhuman effort, despite my telling him stories about various throwing-up stories I'd heard or experienced. I did this because I thought it would make him feel not-so-bad about being sick. But he didn't seem to appreciate my amusing stories. All he said was, gasping, "Dude-don't-talk-about-it. It's-like-a-no-hitter."

[*Actually, I did not make this joke at the time; it came to mind just now and I think it would've been a witty thing to say at the time so I've included it as part of that narrative.]