The Transformations of a Deity: Tracing the Impact of Transcultural Exchanges on Enoshima Island in Japan through the Prism of the Deity Benzaiten

Abstract

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.