Women’s Liberation and Religious Salvation: The Case of Itō Asako and the Muga No Ai (Selfless Love) Movement in Modern Japan

The Muga No Ai (Selfless Love) movement, founded by one-time Jōdo Shin Buddhist priest Itō Shōshin (1876-1963) in Tokyo in 1905, exemplified key trends in the world of modern Japanese religion: leadership by laypeople, synthesis of diverse religions and philosophies, and engagement with progressive politics. While Itō Shōshin’s life and thought have been well-documented by scholars, the remarkable lifestory of his wife, Itō Asako (1881-1956), remains largely unknown. Asako married Shōshin in 1909 and became a leading figure in the Muga No Ai movement—writing for and editing the movement’s journal, overseeing the movement’s business activities, and forever standing alongside Shōshin as an exemplary figurehead of the movement. This paper will introduce Asako’s life and thought, with special attention to how she balanced her religious identity with her burgeoning involvement in the women’s liberation movement. 

Asako’s early life is detailed in a spiritual autobiography titled Watashi no shinkō seikatsu (My life of faith) that was serialized in the Muga no ai journal in 1921-1922. Asako grew up in small mountain village in Yamaguchi prefecture where her father worked as a doctor. At age six, much of Asako’s hair began to fall out, presumably due to alopecia areata. As she grew older, Asako was made to feel ashamed of her baldness and discouraged from going out in public. At age eleven, Asako’s parents separated as a result of her father’s infidelities. In her teenage years and early 20s, Asako lived as a shut-in, working as a seamstress to support her mother, grandmother, and younger siblings. 

Asako’s religious pursuits were spurred by depression, social isolation, and a sense of purposelessness following the deaths of her grandmother and mother. Relatives introduced her to Muga No Ai writings and to a local Muga No Ai community in Yamaguchi. These teachings emboldened her to adopt the appearance of a nun with fully shaved head and go out into the public for the first time in years. Eventually, she had a dramatic faith experience in which she came to view all happenings in the universe, including painful events from her past, as the natural workings of an all-pervading love.

Asako met Shōshin in 1907 when the latter was working as an instructor at a women’s university in Yamaguchi prefecture. Asako revered Shōshin as a Jesus-like figure who fully grasped and embodied the truth of selfless love. She initially interpreted her romantic yearnings for him as selfish cravings that ought to be overcome through spiritual training. However, Shōshin taught Asako that ascetic self-denial of romantic cravings, like self-denial of food, was spiritually unhealthy. 

Following their wedding, Shōshin and Asako moved to Tokyo where they relaunched the Muga no ai journal, organized lecture and preaching events, and ran a milk bar that served as a source of income and meeting place for spiritual seekers. They both wrote prolifically in their movement’s journal about their religious beliefs and day-to-day experiences. Occasionally their writings took the form of poems or short stories. In 1911, while Asako was living apart from Shōshin due to medical reasons, Shōshin published a provocative half-page story about flirtatious correspondence he was having with a young woman. Asako was outraged. The following month, Shōshin published a long confessional article that included a transcription of a dialogue between him and Asako. Asako accused Shōshin of failing to live up to his own teachings of selfless love, while Shōshin defended his actions as manifestations of his universal love for all people. In subsequent issues, many critical opinions of readers were printed, including those of feminist Fukuda Hideko, socialist Sakai Toshihiko, and novelist Mushanokōji Saneatsu. Ultimately, Asako and Shōshin worked through their conflict, coming to an agreement about how to balance the reality of practical needs and distinctions among people with their shared ideal of free and equal love for all. 

Almost exactly a decade later, a similar sequence of events occurred in reverse. This time, Asako published a 23-page story titled “Wakare” (Separation) about her passionate love affair with a younger man. Asako dedicated her story to “the liberated women of the present age.” In the years between Shōshin’s affair and Asako’s, Asako had become a feminist activist. From 1913, she became involved in the Real New Women’s Association (Shinshin Fujinkai). From 1920, alongside Hiratsuka Raichō and others, Asako participated in the founding and governance of the New Women’s Association (Shinfujin Kyōkai), which promoted women’s right to vote and join political organizations. Many members of these associations also outspokenly criticized social mores surrounding marriage and sexuality as oppressive for women.   

“Wakare” provoked a second crisis in the Itō household that was again detailed in the Muga no ai journal. Shōshin wrote an article titled “Warera wa ningen nari” (We are humans) in which he acknowledged his and Asako’s failure to uphold their own teachings of selfless love. Asako and Shōshin’s rocky marriage, described in fine detail for Muga no ai journal readers, had the effect of humbling the founder of a religious movement who had frequently been viewed by followers as a Jesus-like, Buddha-like, or Tolstoy-like figure. As a consequence, Shōshin moderated his own self-image and teachings while Asako grew into a more assertive, confident co-leader of the movement. In his ongoing conversations with socialists and progressives, Shōshin had long maintained that real social change could only come as a result of internal, spiritual realization and reform. In the aftermath of the “Wakare” scandal, Asako began to advocate a different viewpoint in the Muga no ai journal—that social change required a balance of spiritual reform and material, political reform.

Itō Asako found freedom from an oppressive, patriarchal society in a new religious movement and went on to reshape that movement according to her newfound feminist ideals. Through analysis of Asako’s writings, the Muga no ai journal, and secondary scholarship on the Muga No Ai and feminist movements, this paper will investigate the complex connections between religious liberation and political liberation, as well as the impact of feminism and female leadership on one modern religious movement.