The Sea and the Sacred in Japan: Aspects of Maritime Religion [Paperback]

The Sea and the Sacred in Japanis the first book to focus on the role of the sea in Japanese religions. While many leading Shinto deities tend to be understood today as unrelated to the sea, and mountains are considered the privileged sites of sacredness, this book provides new ways to understand Japanese religious culture and history.

Scholars from North America, Japan and Europe explore the sea and the sacred in relation to history, culture, politics, geography, worldviews and cosmology, space and borders, and ritual practices and doctrines. Examples include Japanese indigenous conceptualizations of the sea from the Middle Ages to the 20th century; ancient sea myths and rituals; sea deities and sea cults; the role of the sea in Buddhist cosmology; and the international dimension of Japanese Buddhism and its maritime imaginary.

The Sea and the Sacred in Japanmakes a valuable contribution to the field of Japanese maritime religion that will grant important insights to scholars and graduate students of Japanese religion, history, and literature. Reading Religion

Identifies a number of important research themes that have long remained understudied. As such, it is a timely and relevant contribution to the field, groundbreaking in several respects, which offers a number of new insights and raises some fascinating questions ... This is a very rich volume ... Scholars of Japanese religion and history will undoubtedly find much of interest in the volume, which provides a number of intriguing new insights, based on sound textual and historical analyses. Journal of Religion in Japan

This volume is a very welcome addition to the body of English-language literature on maritime perspectives of Japanese history. Global Maritime History