Kawasaki, April 6 -- Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan's annual fertility festival teemed Sunday with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring "Kanamara" celebration near Tokyo features colourfully dressed worshippers carrying a trio of giant phallic shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival as legend has it honours a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman's vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. Today a three-foot (one-metre) black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of the Kanayama Shrine honouring the Shinto deities of fertility, childbirth and protection from sexually transmitted infections. Over the centuries, sex workers pilgrimaged to the shrine to seek its powers of protection before the festival evolved into a broader fertility rite seeking to destigmatise sex. "I hope the festival can help disabuse people of the notion that sex is a bad, dirty thing," Hiroyuki Nakamura, chief priest at a shrine that hosts the festival, told AFP. In February, preliminary data released by the health ministry showed that Japan's birth rate had fallen for the 10th straight year in 2025. A total of 705,809 babies were born that year in Japan down 2.1 percent from 2024. The data includes births to Japanese nationals in Japan, foreign births in Japan and babies born to Japanese nationals overseas. The open-minded, all-inclusive annual event attracts everyone from tourists to families with children and LGBTQ supporters sporting rainbow outfits....