Scenes at the naked festival - hundreds of men in loincloths (NHK)

Weird World Japan weird world

Injuries reported at Japan’s ‘Naked Festival’, which thankfully isn’t as NSFW at the name suggests

Alistair Coleman. Updated February 26th, 2026

To Japan, home of the world’s weirdest news events, where the annual Naked Festival got a tad out of hand, resulting in six people being hospitalised.

According to the country’s national broadcaster NHK, thousands of near-naked men turned up for the festival at the Saidaiji Kannonin Temple in the city of Okayama last Saturday night.

Mercifully for neutrals, the 10,000-strong male crowd were not entirely naked, and were wearing loincloths to cover their modesty.

It was when the festival reached its peak at 10pm that the trouble started. The lights were turned off and organisers threw sacred sticks – said to bring the owner good luck – into the crowd, causing a crush that left six injured and three unconscious. So much for the good luck sticks.

It’s all part of a 500-year-old tradition known as “Hadaka Matsuri,” so you would have thought they’d have got to grips with the health and safety side of things by now.

According to CNN’s February 2020 visit to the festival, just weeks before the country locked down for Covid, there are only two sacred sticks, and 100 bundles of twigs whose luck-bringing status was not made clear.

The festival was originally clothed, but somewhere in history, people thought that they got in the way, so it’s loincloths and white socks now.

Despite this being seen as an important part of Japan’s cultural heritage, Twitter, as you might expect, had opinions.

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Reactions back in 2020 were equally bewildered:

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In summary:

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Source & Screengrab: NHK World