Culture : A Popular Fertility Festival Has Japan Turning Red : The Tagata Shrine attracts more and more visitors every March, when a special procession is held to ask for a rich bounty.

Buried in antiquity, the origins of Tagata Shrine and its annual festival remain misty. But the reason for the festival’s ever-growing popularity is clear.

Indeed, it’s so obvious that it’s an embarrassment to much of Japan today.

The Japan Travel Bureau, for example, distributes no material about the festival. Few guidebooks, except some written by foreigners, describe it. Only a handful of local newspapers publish photographs of it. And few ordinary Japanese in other sections of the country have ever heard of it.

The attraction is a natural, simplistic expression of primitive Japanese wishes for a rich bounty--a seven-foot-long phallic symbol carved anew each year from Japanese cypress wood. It is carried every March 15 in a procession as an offering to the widow goddess of rice fields to whom the Shinto shrine here is dedicated.

“It’s just like the Dionysian procession in the countryside of ancient Greece,” said Takahiro Awata, a Tagata priest.

The “sacred emblem” of Tagata Shrine also provides a look back to the open, unabashed attitudes toward sex that prevailed in medieval Japan before a sense of embarrassment crept into Japanese social ethics.

Indeed, even at Tagata, one of many shrines throughout the country that celebrate the “emblem,” practices have become a bit more modest. The phallic symbol formerly was attached to the straw doll of a warrior in the procession, but that practice was dropped as “too coarse.” Later, carrying the symbol by itself came to be considered a bit too bold. Now, it is “housed” under a small shrine-like roof, protruding from both ends.

Still, it provokes controversy.

“In the last hundred years, the clash between primitive simplicity and modern complexity has grown. But so has the symbol itself. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and more grotesque. And the festival, which used to be a quiet celebration, has become more rowdy as people see it as an outlet to relieve stress,” Awata said in a somewhat dismayed tone.

The fading religious hue of the festival, however, hasn’t stopped the crowds from growing. In the mid-1960s, attendance was about 20,000. This year, Awata predicted that 70,000 people will show up--albeit fewer than last year’s crowd of 200,000, which was boosted by the fact that the festival date fell on a Sunday.

At least 3,000 foreigners usually show up too. This year, foreign students and students of Nanzan University in Nagoya have been enlisted to serve as interpreters.

Indeed, Awata credits American airmen once stationed at the nearby Komaki Air Base, now a Japan Self-Defense Force installation, with giving the festival the fame it has gained among foreigners, including diplomats. (One year, the Swiss ambassador to Japan and his wife attended.)

Tamahime, the shrine’s goddess, was reputed to have been a widow who, after her husband died, came to the Tagata area with six small children and helped develop the region into rich rice-farming paddies. Not many of the paddies are left today in what increasingly is becoming a suburban community for the metropolis of Nagoya, 40 minutes away by train.

The festival in her honor is a happy, not a lascivious, day--what Shinto is all about, according to Awata.

“Christianity is a religion of love. Buddhism is a religion of mercy. Shinto is a religion of gratitude--of giving thanks for every day of living,” he said.

“We want people to come to pray with that feeling,” Awata said. But he admitted that nowadays few do. Most, he said, come seeking some personal benefit, or merely to see the shrine’s “sacred emblem.”

Nonetheless, the shrine itself, as do most Buddhist temples and other Shinto shrines throughout the country, caters to worshipers seeking personal benefits by selling prayers and amulets for health and traffic safety and one for “everything you wish,” as well as Tagata’s specialties: for en-musubi (“tying the knot”), pregnancy, safe birth and protection from venereal diseases. And with the decline in farming and the increase in shops, charms for prosperity in business sell well too.

When a wish comes true, the amulets--in the shape of the phallic symbol--are to be returned to the shrine along with a new amulet as an offering of gratitude to Tamahime.

Occasional protesters of the festival have thrown the symbols, displayed in a rear shrine on the precincts, into nearby fields or a pond, “but all of them became sick afterward” as a punishment, Awata insisted, adding: “The border between magic and religion is always ambiguous.”

No record exists to show when the shrine was established, the priest said. “But in 1935, an old sword and a crucible that were thought to be 1,500 years old were found in the shrine precincts,” he added.

Legend and fragmentary records also reveal no clue as to why a phallic symbol has become the focus of the March 15 celebration. It is supposed to be a planting-season festival praying for a bountiful harvest of crops and for peace and security in the nation.

To Awata, the shrine’s “sacred emblem” stands as a symbol of the origin of life itself--and a symbol of the fertilizing power of heaven impregnating the earth with crops.

Use of the symbol may be rooted in the prehistoric Japanese myth that holds that everything in the universe was created by the mating of the sky-father Izanagi and the earth-mother Izanami--Japan’s Adam and Eve without the snake, the apple or any sense of shame and sin, the priest said.

Indeed, at the Tagata festival there is no sense of shame or sin.

Town elders remain active in shrine affairs even today--to a such a degree that the priests have to seek approval from all of them every time the shrine wants to do something, Awata complained.

Last fall, the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley asked Tagata Shrine to donate a carved phallus to its collection of 3.8 million objects from around the world, said Awata, showing a letter the shrine had received from Burton Benedict, professor emeritus of anthropology. But the town elders are balking.

“They fear our important treasure will be mistreated,” said a disgruntled Awata, who favors the gift.

“When foreigners think of Shinto, they think of Yasukuni” in Tokyo, which enshrines the souls of Japan’s war dead, including World War II leaders executed as war criminals, Awata said. “I want them to know Shinto as a happy religion.”

Shinto, which still considers Japan’s emperor to be a god, treats all forms of nature as gods. More than 80,000 gods are worshiped, Awata said.

Ironically, despite the massive crowds it attracts, staging the March 15 festival costs Tagata more money than it makes. Most of the shrine’s income comes from visitors on ordinary weekends who purchase prayers and amulets, Awata said.

Tagata, nonetheless, is in better shape than most Shinto shrines. Of 111 shrines in the region, only 15 support full-time chief priests, he said. In all of Japan, there are only 21,000 priests for about 80,000 shrines, according to the Jinja Honcho (“Shrine Central Agency”) in Tokyo.

But Awata is confident that Tagata’s future will be brighter. In an age of sex-related diseases, such as AIDS, “Tagata provides a place to recall sexual ethics, respect of life and richness of heart. I think that from this time on will be the era for Tagata.”

Chiaki Kitada, a research assistant in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau, contributed to this story.