My guidebook claims that a country walk will take one from Meiji Mura to Ogata-jingu, a shrine dedicated to female fertility. There is widespread amazement among the staff at Meiji Mura when I ask for directions. A conference is called. They assure me that walking to Ogata-jingu is not possible and that I should either call a taxi or first get a bus to Inuyama and then a train from there. In fact, all kinds of alternatives are suggested, but none of them include even a token amount of walking. I won’t have any of this, of course. The Japanese are as well known for their unnecessary incredulity as are Americans when it comes to the suggestion that two places can be linked on foot. To save them further anguish, I ostensibly agree to the suggestion that I go via Inuyama, and pretend to wait at the bus stop. But then I nonchalantly dawdle across the car park, sidle away around the corner, and then march fast down the hill, hoping to be well out of earshot if they discover my ‘mistake’.

Despite having a GPS unit with me I get lost in the switchbacks across the tops of the intervening hills, and probably walk three times as far as necessary. Eventually I find an old man cutting wood, who offers to drive me to the shrine in his miniature truck. Aware that evening is fast approaching, I accept.

I am led to believe that Ogata-jingu is replete in representations of female genitalia, but when I get there I discover it is far less vulval than I’d imagined (or hoped). The crest of the shrine is made of three (or nine, depending on how I look at it) pairs of labia, but otherwise the sexuality of the place is not evident. I’d expected to see vaginas in all states of receptivity, from the apricot-like to the cavernous. No such luck. I don’t have the guts to ask the miko-san where the objects resembling female genitals are kept. I do, however, see a rooster in the shrine, which leads me to wonder if I will see a cat when I later visit Tagata-jingu, the nearby male counterpart to Ogata-jingu.

At Tagata-jingu the male genitals are, of course, proudly displayed in all forms: erect, floppy, arched, straight, helical, and peculiar asymmetric shapes. Penises stand in the flower beds, and lean against walls. Some are obviously ‘found’ objects, others have been carefully crafted. I can see a huge five-metre wooden penis poised menacingly in the dark of one of the side-buildings. There are pictures of the local festival held on 15 March, when this monster is taken out and pulled around the streets. Ogata-jingu has its festival on the same day, and every five years they hold them together, so to speak. No cat materialises.

That the Japanese people have such shrines is not so much a peculiarity of theirs, rather, given our own widespread (but furtive) veneration of genitalia, it is more peculiar that we don’t. Nicholas Bornoff documents a great deal of the erotic in Japanese society in his fascinating book, Pink samurai. There is a unique mix of down-to-earth paganism and fetishism about Japanese sexuality. A mother’s natural wish that her daughter will be fertile can often be expressed by her sitting the little girl astride a giant penis at a fertility shrine. In Empire of signs Roland Barthes makes the interesting observation that in Japan the sexuality is all in the sex, whereas in the USA it is in everything but sex. He could mean almost anything (that’s the trouble with Barthes) but something about this statement rings true to me.

Across the road from Tagata-jingu the video store, whose hours are advertised as 10:00 to 25:00, caters to all the passions aroused in the shrine, by offering hundreds of videos in the appropriate genre.

Leaving Tagata-jingu at about five o’clock I encounter the local rush hour, which consists wholly of like-attired women (black coats, black boots), cramming themselves into the railway station. I share a carriage with two other men and sixty to eighty women. The average working male in Japan is still hard at it at 5 pm. In fact, he appears never to stop. I wonder if the delicate, refined, and sometimes cutesy nature of much of what is offered in Japan is due to there being a predominantly young female audience for it. The legend has it that the Japanese male is a rarely seen nocturnal visitor at home, is interred for all hours of daylight in his office, then submerged in the floating world until it is time to sleep. Never seen outside, he is unable to influence anything public. Hardly able to influence much at work or home either, he is the sacrificial drone of Japanese society.