MAINICHI DAILY NEWS (Tokyo, Japan) 07 December 06 Snake-eating starlet props up the last of the traveling freak shows (Ryann Connell)
A snake-eating woman is being attributed with keeping alive one of the Japanese entertainment world's oldest traditions, according to Shukan Post (12/15).
Japan once boasted of a rich tradition of traveling tent freak shows, but now there are only three left, one of which is Irikata Kogyo.
Traveling freak shows were once a feature of Japan's hundreds of festivals, but with other media like TV offering far more realistic freaks -- even on variety shows -- than the tacky treats the traveling tents can offer, times are hardly fruitful for the carryovers from the past.
Irikata Kogyo was formed in 2001, but struggled for years to attract any customers. Just when it seemed the tent show would have to seal its flaps forever, along came the mysterious Koyuki -- a woman who eats live snakes.
Koyuki never talks during her performance. She's known to be 20 years old, but nobody knows anything else about her and she's certainly not telling them, either.
"She has a 10-minute performance that she keeps on performing throughout the day," an Irikata Kogyo spokesman tells Shukan Post. "On a busy day, she'll eat 30 snakes. During Yasukuni Shrine's festival in the summer, she gobbled up 120 snakes in just four days."
Koyuki's performance follows a typical pattern -- she unsheathes snakes roughly 1-meter-long from within their newspaper wrappings, rubs the reptiles along her tongue, licking them as she holds them up to display them to her audience. Then, she shoves the snake head-first into her mouth and slowly swallows it. She continues chomping away even as its blood slowly pours down the front of her garments.
"Since Koyuki started performing with us about three years ago, we've started to get people come into the tent to see us," the Irikata Kogyo spokesman tells Shukan Post. "Without her, there's no hope that traveling freak shows could survive."
Snake-eating starlet props up the last of the traveling freak shows