Masayuki Ito (born 1964) is a Japanese sociologist specializing in the sociology of religion and contemporary spirituality. Born in Nagoya, he graduated from Ritsumeikan University’s College of Social Sciences in 1989 and earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. After a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science research fellowship and teaching in Aichi Gakuin University’s Department of International Culture, he became a professor in its Department of Religious Culture in 2021. His research examines practices and forms of religious awareness that extend beyond religious organizations. In Gendai Supirichuariti Bunkaron, he traced spirituality’s movement from the countercultures of the 1960s toward contemporary pursuits of happiness, examining yoga, mindfulness and positive psychology alongside debates about secularization and the boundaries of religion. Gendai Yoga Ron explored how Indian traditions and Western physical culture combined in modern yoga, its development in Japan, and its scriptures and bodily techniques. It also examined consumer society, harassment by teachers and changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Shigo no Ishiki followed encounters between science and spirituality in Japan and the West from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Through accounts of past-life memories, mediumship and near-death experiences, it investigated how understandings of life after death were formed and transformed.
