A steam of sweat rose as hundreds of naked men tussled over a bag of wooden talismans, performing a dramatic end to a thousand-year-old ritual in Japan that took place for the last time. Their passionate chants of “jasso, joyasa” (meaning “evil, be gone”) echoed through a ceder forest of the northern Japan’s Iwate region, … Continue reading Japan’s ‘naked men’ festival succumbs to population ageing