“In moments of intoxication I felt something, not a wish, but a habit left by former wishes. In sober moments I knew this to be a delusion, and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I could surmise of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.”
― Leo Tolstoy

In the US, “Ikigai”, pronounced “ee-kee-guy”, has become a somewhat popular self-improvement meme.  Type the term into Amazon and you’ll find dozens of inclusive titles… I stopped counting at thirty. Supposedly a Japanese concept, it addresses finding a happy and satisfying balance in one’s life.  Some references seem to indicate that it emerged from Okinawan culture… perhaps a product of meditating over the local rum.

Written in Japanese as, “生き甲斐”, the first two characters mean, to live, and the second two work together as, “to avail at”, “to find use in”, or “to find worth from”. Essentially, a closest Western interpretation might be, “meaning of life”.

According to the current crop of American self-improvement sources, it’s actually a pretty simple idea. In fact, it’s suspiciously similar to my own definition of “expertise” as a combination of talent, skill, and enthusiasm. Ikigai merely strips that down to finding something you love doing and that you’re good at, and adds in the idea that whatever it produces should be of sufficient value to others that you can make a living from it.

Unfortunately for me, while there are many things that I enjoy, and a few that I’ve actually become pretty good at, they don’t necessarily intersect in a way where anyone would be willing to pay me enough to make a living. But long ago having arrived at the conclusion that making a living was rather important to doing the things I enjoy, I simply separated them into a more capitalist, “investment” and “return”.

But is this idea of happy capitalism really a “Japanese” thing? Is the meaning-of-life a secret revealed by some Okinawan bar-musician who enjoys free drinks from the patrons? Or perhaps those hoards of Tokyo salarymen seemingly sleeping-while-standing on an overcrowded morning commuter train are actually meditating on the significance of their office-work? Or is it something discovered only in Tolstoy-esque moments of after-hours intoxication at the izakaya?

Descending head-first down this rabbit hole of J-pop psychology, I DuckDuckGoed “ikigai” and went directly to the authoritative repository of all communal human knowledge… Wikipedia. And since somebody else already went to the trouble of writing this, I’ll just lift their anonymous words, “…the concept of ikigai has long existed in Japanese culture,”… continuing with the the footnoted statement that must make that claim true, “it was first popularised by Japanese psychiatrist and academic Mieko Kamiya in her 1966 book ‘On the Meaning of Life’ (生きがいについて, ikigai ni tsuite).[11]”

Cool! So I could go directly to the source and entirely bypass the copyrights of all those intermediary American self-help gurus. But then… “The book has not yet been translated into English.”

So my next question was whether or not Mieko Kamiya made it past third-year kanji. From her Wiki page, “…she studied by herself classical literature in many languages, including Italian, French, German, and Greek,” and, “In the fall of 1944, she graduated from the medical school and entered the department of psychiatry of Tokyo University.” And finally, “She earned her Ph.D. in 1960.”

The kanji dictionary was going to get some use for this one.

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In, On the Meaning of Life, Mieko Kamiya was conveying something that she had felt while working with leprosy patients at the Aiseien Sanatorium on Nagashima Island in southern-central Japan, and that she hints became fully realized with the writing of the book. She never clearly defined this feeling, saying only that it gives a person a sense of having a “meaning in life”. And she insisted that it’s something that each person has to find as an individual. That is, it’s discovered as opposed to created.

Kamiya posited that the start of this journey is the realization that we exist in a world of something far greater than ourselves. She was perhaps alluding to something spiritual, but through an engagement with the nature of an environment. This is a little difficult to explain in a “Western” sense, but it involves a very Japanese idea of intimately feeling and understanding the natural space, condition, and flow of events in a particular environment. And while this idea extends to the nature of any “space”, Kamiya also emphasizes Earth’s own environment in this regard.

By engaging with an environment in an understanding but challenging way, Kamiya contends that it will gradually reveal and nurture the development of a larger sense of purpose to one’s life. In effect, something naturally emerges in the consciousness that eventually motivates the effort. But she also states that finding a true motivation, something that resonates with a person’s own deepest feelings, is essential. The process entails both searching and effort, but without the determined objective of finding purpose. Instead, deeper meaning emerges from the process.

In some ways, what Kamiya describes sounds a bit like Thomas Maslow’s, “self-actualization”… but without the pyramid scheme.  She doesn’t suggest that one who finds ikigai will live a perfect life without sadness or loss.  And she’s certainly not talking about money.  Rather, she’s saying that finding a way to move through life with a sense of resonating purpose allows one to experience it with a feeling that it progresses in a meaningful manner.  She compares this to “buds” and “blossoms” emerging from the experiences of sadness and suffering.

Kamiya also contends that it’s important to notice and to engage individuals in this process.  She compares the full engagement with another person as something like noticing a single flower or the song of a single bird in a field of flowers or a forest of birds. It brings about an awareness of the source of that greater something which surrounds us, and allows one to engage with it directly. In this sense, she’s suggesting that acknowledging the individual allows for a purposeful awareness of the greater society.

“Ikigai”, according to Kamiya, is thus something that existence offers through engaging with it in a constructive manner. It isn’t a goal or an objective, but rather something that’s just there for anyone who comes to notice its place in one’s life. It’s an awareness caused by engaging with the world in way that reveals its source.

At this point, I’ll move into my own observations. Kamiya didn’t intend, On the Meaning of Life, as a technical work, despite her being a medically-trained psychiatrist. Rather, it was intended as something accessible to ordinary Japanese struggling with a sense of purpose in a collective and industrialized society.  Regardless, it was a difficult read for me, so there’s much that I’m sure I missed.

Kamiya was raised in a Japanese Christian environment, and this certainly affected her attitudes. But what Kamiya describes sounds much like the Buddhist idea of meditation through active and focused engagement with momentary existence in ways that are positive or constructive. In particular, Buddhism seeks to minimize or to alleviate suffering. And this is a kind of focus of effort that can be meaningful to others, and that can consequently connect one to the greater purpose of society as a whole. However, it’s not clear that Kamiya is necessarily speaking from either a Christian or a Buddhist perspective, as she also attributes such a greater purpose to interaction with nature and with the Earth itself.

While the Westernized version of “ikigai” as a form of both personally and financially rewarding occupation might be loosely drawn from this, it’s not exactly what Kamiya was saying. She did suggest that efforts worthwhile to others will have a social value. But more importantly, the innate worth of truly constructive endeavor can bring about a passionate engagement with life.

In Tolstoy’s lament, he was analyzing the result of a life without any greater purpose.  He wrote, “…that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life – was a belief in perfecting myself.”  But exhausting his efforts, Tolstoy eventually determined that by having turned inward, he had also disconnected himself from the vastly greater world in which he existed.  His solution, discovered late in his own life, was simply to look outward and engage with the larger forces that allowed for life itself.

So perhaps the counter to Tolstoy’s sober truth was merely to bring a smile to the face of some friendly bar-musician.

Mieko Kamiya (神谷 美恵子), was born Mieko Maeda (前田 美恵子) on 12 January 1914 in Okayama, Japan.  She died from heart disease, probably due to tuberculosis, on 12 October 1979 at the age of 65.

Kamiya was remarkably well educated and multi-lingual, much acquired through self study.  Eventually, she obtained a PhD and became a professor at both Kobe College, and at her alma mater, Tsuda College, teaching both psychiatry and French literature.  In 1965, she became chief psychiatrist at Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium.

NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai), the Japanese National Broadcasting Service, produced a story of her life in May of 2018.  Written by Eisuke Wakamatsu, it was called, Mieko Kamiya “About the Purpose of Life”.  Despite her achievements, Mieko Kamiya apparently lived a quite difficult life.

Post Script: Since writing this, I’ve come across a great deal more information regarding Mieko Kamiya, and it’s caused me to see, On the Meaning of Life, in a rather different context.  I think Kamiya was very much responding to what she saw as the loss of social cohesion and individual alienation in post-war Japan.

The long explanation would be worthy of another article in itself, and involves the Japanese Christian, Friends (Quaker) community and the destruction of Nagasaki, Kamiya’s father, Tamon Maeda (前田 多門), who was appointed (and removed) as Japan’s first post-war Education Minister in General Douglas MacArthur’s reconstruction of Japan, and the writings of Inazō Nitobe (新渡戸 稲造).  I have little doubt that what Kamiya was trying to express was a route to rebuilding a sense of Japanese spiritual connection and community in the absence of a spiritually uniting kokutai, or Imperial House.

By 1966, the Japanese population had endured two decades of fully committed reconstruction.  This had altogether absorbed an entire generation of efforts, and resulted in terrible environmental damage.  The result was a burnt-out population, sporadic violent nationalist and communist uprisings, and lethal levels of environmental pollution. 

Counter to this, Kamiya saw the peace in her own life, despite her own sufferings, and sought to share what she saw as its source with a larger Japanese community.  Influenced by her own beliefs and the interpretations of Japanese tradition that arose from within her own community, she was very much a product of her time and place in history.