The Transformations of a Deity: Tracing the Impact of Transcultural Exchanges on Enoshima Island in Japan through the Prism of the Deity Benzaiten
Travel guides, web blogs, and other forms of modern media often praise the buildings, gardens, and artwork of Japanese Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines as exemplars of traditional Japanese cultural practices and values. This interpretation situates these sites within a Japanese cultural milieu, but aside from references to Buddhism’s Indian origins or the Chinese abbots of a particular monastery, less attention is given to defining their identities within global cultural exchanges and negotiations. This paper applies insights from transcultural studies to the history of Japan’s Enoshima Island and Benzaiten, a water-culture deity long venerated at the island’s shrines, in order to analyze the impact of inbound cultural flows on the creation and subsequent evolution of the Benzaiten cult and the island’s economic development. This study also examines how the product of these exchanges (new interpretations of Benzaiten and Enoshima) are interjected back into global cultural flows via tourism and mass media.
Copyright (c) 2025 The Journal of Transcultural Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
More Citation Formats
Copyright (c) 2025 The Journal of Transcultural Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
