Ebisu

Ebisu is one of the Shichifukujin, the Seven Lucky Gods of Japanese folk religion, traditionally depicted as a smiling fisherman holding a sea bream and a fishing rod, patron of merchants, fishermen, and good fortune. Within Oda's iconographic project, which has long reworked male deities and Buddhist figures into feminine forms — most notably in her Treasure Ship Goddesses series, where the seven gods are reimagined as a crew of voluptuous women — an Ebisu print presents a feminized incarnation of the deity rather than the conventional bearded patriarch. Such a recasting is characteristic of Oda's career-long argument that the divine is feminine and that women belong in symbolic positions that patriarchal religion has reserved for men. Technically, the print employs the mokuhanga vocabulary of carved keyblock outline, registered color blocks, and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) shading on [washi](/glossary/washi), applied through [baren](/glossary/baren) pressure. The treasure-ship motif, with its associations of bounty arriving from the sea, also resonates with Oda's later environmental and anti-nuclear activism centered on the protection of the Pacific.