In January 2021, Japan’s Cabinet Office asked more than 1,300 people over the age of sixty a simple question: when do you feel ikigai? They could give as many answers as they liked. Time with family, grandchildren included, came first, at 55 per cent. Second, less than two points behind, was eating something delicious.
Being absorbed in work came in at 22 per cent.
If you’ve only met ikigai online, that may come as a surprise. The version that circulates in the West is a diagram of four overlapping circles: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. Ikigai sits in the middle, where all four meet. It’s tidy, ambitious and very hard to live up to. It also isn’t Japanese.
Where the Diagram Came From
In 2011, Andrés Zuzunaga drew a four-circle diagram he called Propósito, purpose, and it appeared in a Spanish self-help book the following year. In May 2014, a blogger named Marc Winn, who had heard the word ikigai in a TED talk about the world’s longest-lived people, put it in the middle of those circles and posted the result. The image travelled around the world. Winn has since credited the diagram to Zuzunaga.
The diagram isn’t a bad way to think about a career. It just describes a different thing.
What the Word Means
Ikigai is written 生き甲斐. Iki is living. Kai, which softens to gai, means worth, or what you get in return for something, and Japan’s largest dictionary traces it to an old verb meaning to exchange. Put together, ikigai is what makes being alive worth it. Dictionaries define it as something worth living for, and as the zest and joy of going on living.
The word is old. The earliest example in that same dictionary comes from a fourteenth-century war chronicle, which describes a life without it.
The Psychiatrist Who Wrote the Book
One of the people who thought most carefully about ikigai was a psychiatrist named Mieko Kamiya. From 1957 she worked at Nagashima Aiseien, Japan’s first national leprosy sanatorium, on an island off Okayama, among patients cut off from the lives they had known. Her book On Ikigai, published in 1966, took her seven years to write. Early in it she observes that the word seems to exist only in Japanese.
Kamiya noticed that people use the word in two ways. Ikigai can be the thing itself: this child is my ikigai. It can also be the feeling, which she called ikigai-kan. She thought it was close to happiness without being the same. It looks forward, and it sits nearer the core of a person. At its heart is the sense that your life is needed.
Small, Daily and Close at Hand
A large study in northern Japan followed more than 43,000 adults for seven years. Those who said they had no ikigai were about one and a half times as likely to die during the study, mostly from heart disease and external causes. It was one question, asked once, and it shows a link rather than a cause. But it suggests the feeling matters.
What gives people that feeling in Japan is rarely grand. A national labour institute’s survey in 2010 found leisure and hobbies ahead of family, and both well ahead of work. The psychologist Akihiro Hasegawa has pointed out that the English word life covers two Japanese ones: jinsei, a lifetime, and seikatsu, daily life. Ikigai, he says, belongs with seikatsu. The neuroscientist Ken Mogi suggests starting the day with something you love, and offers his own example: chocolate and coffee.
This is a much easier standard to meet.
The Day the List Comes True
Take the television out of the Cabinet Office’s top five and what’s left is family, something delicious, long meals and conversation with friends, and the things you love doing. It’s also a fair description of a good wedding weekend.
In Kamiya’s first sense, a wedding is the rare day when all of those things are in one place: the grandmother who is someone’s reason for getting up in the morning, the friends who carried you through your twenties. In her second sense, it’s a day of ikigai-kan, the feeling, shared by a whole room, that each person in it is needed.
That’s why we take the small things as seriously as the big ones. The breakfast on the first morning. The seat that puts a grandfather beside the person he flew across the world to see. The dinner that goes on long enough for the conversation to get good. The four circles are a fine way to plan a career. A wedding runs on the small, close, everyday kind of ikigai, the kind people in Japan have been talking about for more than six centuries.
Leaping Into Heaven
In his talk about the world’s longest-lived people, the writer Dan Buettner described meeting a woman of 102 in Okinawa. Her ikigai, she told him, was her great-great-great-granddaughter. Asked what it felt like to hold her, she said it felt like leaping into heaven.
Nobody needed a diagram to understand her.
More from our Japanese word series: ichi-go ichi-e, the unrepeatable moment; omotenashi, hospitality that anticipates; and yūgen, the feeling beneath the feeling.
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