The Elusive Ikigai

IF I HAD A rupee for every time someone earnestly told me how reading the self-help manual Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life had transformed them, I’d be a rich woman. Non-Japanese people explaining the profundities of how the Japanese view life, the universe, and everything, needs its very own neologism. Japansplaining, perhaps. Or we can simply stick with the tried and trusted term: orientalism.

The global hordes of Ikigai-reading devotees appear convinced of this ‘ancient’ Eastern philosophy’s deep roots in Japan. They seem to imagine it as a nation of gently content people, at the intersection of a metaphysical Venn diagram, who have found their true purpose in life by being paid for things they love doing, are good at, and that also congruently improve the world.

But over the four years that I lived in Tokyo, I would have been hard-pressed to name anyone who fitted this description. The Japanese I met were overworked, stressed, emotionally repressed, and often depressed. Within Japan, the news media were far more likely to mention the term hikikomori than ikigai.

Hikikomori are a category of people who have turned into extreme recluses, choosing to end all social contact, often refusing to leave their homes for years on end. In Japan, they number over a million people, although precise figures are debated. Youngsters who become “shut-ins” do so for a complex of reasons, ranging from pressure to perform in school, job uncertainty, and failure in exams or relationships—that is, a failure to find any kind of ikigai. Living up to the high, often rigid, expectations of Japanese society has become harder, as employment has become more insecure. A culture of shame adds to this downward spiral.

Mental illnesses in Japan remain stigmatised and often undiagnosed, which is surprising given its advanced economy. Emotional expression in general is discouraged. As a result, its suicide rates are the highest among the G7 group of rich countries. On average, 17.5 per 1,00,000 people kill themselves in Japan, compared to 13 in the US, 11.3 in Canada, and 7.5 in Britain. In fact, seppuku, or suicide by ritualised disembowelment has a greater cultural cache in the archipelago than ikigai, with several cultural icons, including literary superstar Yukio Mishima, having ended their life thus.

The first story that I reported from Tokyo was on another Japanese term that preoccupied the country more than ikigai: karoshi, or death by overwork. In December 2015, Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old employee of the advertising firm Dentsu, jumped off the top floor of a company dormitory. She had allegedly survived on about 10 hours of sleep a week, for several weeks. According to her family lawyers, Takahashi’s overtime between October 9 and November 7, 2015 amounted to 105 hours.

According to the online statistics aggregator Statista, 1,935 people died in Japan due to work-environment problems in 2021. These included suicides as well as deaths due to brain and cardiac illnesses linked to overwork.

Following the Takahashi suicide, a number of government initiatives were launched to combat karoshi. For example, a campaign dubbed ‘Premium Friday’ that encouraged companies to allow employees an early finish on the last Friday of every month was announced. The move failed, with most employees refusing to leave early on Fridays.

And there was more to the practice of staying long hours at the offices than ingrained habit, the demands of the boss, or even virtue signalling. Employees often had nowhere else to go. With cramped homes and long commutes being the norm for Japan’s salarymen, offices served as quiet spaces or ‘dens’ for many people.

The Japanese I met were overworked, stressed, emotionally repressed, and often depressed. Within Japan, the news media were far more likely to mention the term Hikikomori, than Ikigai. Hikikomori are a category of people who have turned into extreme recluses, choosing to end all social contact, often refusing to leave their homes for years on end

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This is the perfect segue into busting another myth favoured by the Japansplaining devotees of the tidying-up fairy: Marie Kondo. In the global imagination, thanks to popular temples to retail à la Muji and Uniqlo, there is a sense that Japanese homes are all about minimalist, lightly scented spaces, where all excess that doesn’t “spark joy”, in Kondo’s Netflix-amplified words, is dispensed of.

They need to visit an actual Japanese apartment. These are normally so tiny that it isn’t uncommon for a middle-class family of four to live and cook in a space of about 50 square metres. Toys, bedding, utensils, and cleaning equipment overflow from shelves and onto the floor in a flood of clutter. The problem of gomi yashiki (houses overflowing with junk) and gomi-beya (apartments crammed with junk from floor to ceiling) are the staple of reality TV shows.

There are many reasons for the extreme, unKondo-like messiness of the average Japanese home. The space crunch and consumerism (to which Zen spirit notwithstanding, Japanese are as much susceptible as anyone else) are the obvious culprits. Another uniquely Japanese factor is the complexity of mandatory recycling rules, which can feel like they require an advanced degree to master. Ergo, it is easier to horde than dispense with junk, lest one risk the combined dark forces of municipal and neighbourly disapproval.

Even Kondo herself has recently confessed to giving up on the “life-changing magic of tidying up,” (the title of one of her books), now that she has three children to look after. In a statement, she said, “My home is messy, but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me…at this stage of my life.” The shooshing sound heard around the world— the loudest since the eruption of Mt Krakatoa in 1883— was the collective exhalation of mothers around the world releasing years of pent-up guilt.

Words like ikigai or shinrinyoku, translated in English as the profound-sounding “forest bathing”, but whose import in Japan is simply to take a walk in the woods, do not have the mystical sense that they acquire once they go global. It’s a bit like the word breakfast in English, which just means a mundane morning meal, having lost its etymological sense of “breaking one’s fast”. Or the Hindi word, namaste, which today is akin to “hey”, rather than “I bow to you.”

Interestingly, many Japanese terms that are repurposed to lend an aura of ancient wisdom to them by the West are then reimported back to Japan, feeding a sense of orientalist-inspired national difference, best evidenced in the genre of writing known as nihonjinron.

This genre was mainly a 20th-century phenomenon that fed on the foreign writings of people like the Greek-Irish Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). These perpetuated ideas about Japan’s supposedly “unique qualities”, including the salience of nonverbal communication and the ostensibly exceptional relationship with nature that the Japanese had. “It is inborn in the Japanese,” Hearn wrote in a July 1892 essay in The Atlantic magazine, “the soul of the race comprehends Nature infinitely better than we (Westerners) do…” These ideas found a global cache and were later adopted by Japanese writers to explain themselves.

The current popularity of ikigai, etc has given a new breed of Nihojinron writers grist for the mill. An example is Awakening Your Ikigai: How the Japanese Wake Up to Joy and Purpose Every Day, by Mogi Kenichiro, a neuroscientist in Tokyo. The book is enjoying some popularity within a Japan that is newly cognisant of the age-old idea of the importance of ikigai to its culture.

But the bald fact is that given its myriad problems with mental health, overwork, and small space-living, the country that could really do with finding its ikigai is Japan itself.

About The Author

Pallavi Aiyar

Pallavi Aiyar is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has spent the last two decades reporting from China, Europe, Indonesia and Japan. Her most recent book is Orienting: An Indian in Japan. She is a contributor to Open

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