“Ikigai” vs. Ikigai

The long strange trip of a word from Japanese to English and back again

Many words in Japanese have been borrowed from English and other languages. We call these gairaigo, literally “words that came from abroad.” Many of them are foods: piza for “pizza,” hanbagaa for “hamburger,” or koohii for “coffee,” just to name a few. The concept isn’t limited to my country, of course: virtually every English speaker knows the words “sushi,” “typhoon,” and “tsunami,” for instance, all of which arrived in English from Japanese.

There is another type of loanword that Japanese use in daily life: wasei eigo, literally “Japanese-English.” We differentiate these terms because they sound like English, but were coined by Japanese speakers. For instance, plus alpha. Any idea what it means? We use it to mean a bonus extra, or a boost to something. How about my boom? That’s what we call a personal fad. A few are well enough known abroad to qualify as loanwords there, such as level up and salaryman. English has counterparts to wasei eigo, too: borrowed from Japanese, but used in different ways than natives would. Like “tycoon,” meaning “wealthy businessman” in English. But you might be surprised to learn that it is a synonym for “shogun” in Japanese.

I bring all of this up because of a word that has become almost inescapable in English recently: ikigai, from the Japanese for “reason for living.” It seems a straightforward loanword, but I’ve noticed that English speakers use it in a very different way from Japanese speakers. Before we get into that, let’s take a quick look at the history of the word in translation (or more accurately, in borrowing.)

Ikigai has long been used in Japanese. Nobuhiko Kanda, a professor at Bunkyo University, wrote a paper in which he traced its first known appearance in print to a dictionary from 1908. But the commercialization of the concept began in the mid-1960s. That is when dozens of Japanese books with ikigai in the title started being published, sparking a fad that continued through the 1990s.

Ikigai appears to have entered the English lexicon in 2008 via a writer named Dan Buettner and his bestselling book The Blue Zones, which profiled regions where inhabitants seemed to be unusually long lived. One of these places was Okinawa. In a 2009 TED Talk, Buettner declared that “in the Okinawan language there is not even a word for retirement. Instead, there is one word that imbues your entire life, and that word is ‘ikigai.’ And, roughly translated, it means ‘the reason for which you wake up in the morning.’” (I am suspicious of the idea that there isn’t any word for retirement in the Ryukyu dialect, and I don’t see ikigai as anything specific to Okinawa, but these concerns are beside the point here.)

The TED talk inspired a blogger by the name of Marc Winn, who in 2014 applied the concept of ikigai to a pre-existing Venn diagram that was made by a Spanish astrologer named Andres Zuzunaga. Zuzunaga’s chart claimed that one’s purpose might be found at the overlapping intersection of “what you love,” “what you’re good at,” “what the world needs,” and “what you can be paid for.” But as Winn wrote in a blog post last February, “I replaced ‘Purpose’ with ‘Ikigai,’ merging Buettner’s cultural concept with Zuzunaga’s visual.” The mash-up went viral, quickly spreading to “HR seminars, life-coaching sessions, and entrepreneurial workshops, amassing billions of views.”

Among these viewers were a pair of writers named Héctor Garcia and Francesco Miralle. They were writing a Spanish-language book that would be released in English translation in 2017 as Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life. Like Buettner, they explored longevity in Okinawa, but they also used Winn’s chart in their book. Their global mega-success helped mainstream ikigai into foreign tongues, connecting it to both happiness and personal prosperity. By 2018 it had become so widely used that the Oxford English Dictionary bestowed it with an official entry. And so a new gairaigo was born.

Or is it wasei eigo? The way in which English speakers use “ikigai” differs subtly but critically from the way in which Japanese do. In the West it’s a secular form of prosperity gospel; in Japan, it is more akin to a psychological diagnosis. (To make things easier henceforth, I’ll use “ikigai” in quotes to refer to the English adoption, and ikigai in italics to refer to original Japanese usage.) Now, let me say up front, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. But what I find fascinating is that now the Japanese government has now seized upon the word, reverse importing it back into Japan as though it were a new concept, right along with the ikigai-astrology chart. You might be asking yourself, how is that possible? I certainly was, when I first saw it. But the answer can be found in the gulf between “ikigai” and ikigai.

In English, “ikigai” has come to mean “a passion that gives value and joy to life.” (I am quoting the Japanese government quoting Garcia and Miralle who are in turn channeling Buettner here in a linguistic game of telephone.) “Ikigai” has also, because of that chart, become closely associated with fortune, in terms of finding work that you enjoy.

But in the Japanese, ikigai has a much heavier meaning. It is neither about passion nor prosperity. It is about survival. The word literally means something “worth putting your life on the line for.” In other words, if you fail, death awaits. Because ikigai has these heavy connotations, in colloquial Japanese it is really only used in situations that represent extremes on a spectrum: either deathly serious or joking around.

The most commonly encountered usage is the latter. Like, you’re out with friends, and someone says “drinking beer is my ikigai,” ha ha ha (then takes another big drink). It’s kind of like how English speakers might say, “I can’t live without my [fill in the blank].” Of course you can, but that’s not the point, and everyone knows it.

When I think about this kind of ikigai I think about middle-aged K-pop fans. According to 2023 statistics, the majority of Japanese fans of BTS are women in their 40s and 50s! And this tracks, because some of my friends are among them. They love going to shows and screaming their lungs out. Whenever they tell me about their latest concert adventure, they inevitably describe it as their ikigai and we laugh.

Now, on to that heavier usage. This ikigai is mainly used in relation to elder care, in terms of people who are struggling, mentally and physically, late in life. Their survival is dependent on finding a reason to stay engaged in life. It’s commonly held that finding an ikigai will stave off age-related ailments like boke, senility. This is something anyone who has elderly family or friends takes very seriously. It can be a literal matter of life and death.

It might surprise you to hear that when I was growing up in Japan, the adults in my life – my parents, my teachers – counseled me to avoid looking for my ikigai. This wasn’t some attempt to crush my spirit. What they meant was the opposite: they wanted me to keep my mind open. You’re too young to narrow your focus, the thinking went. Don’t be picky; try anything and everything, even if it might seem boring at first. I recall being told once that I hadn’t lived nearly long enough to have found my ikigai in that sense of “putting my life on the line for something.”

The caution wasn’t only reserved for kids. There was a sense that ikigai, if applied in the wrong way, could foster unhealthy attachments or dependency. This was especially true if your ikigai centered on other people. In my parents’ generation, the stereotypical definition of ikigai was raising kids. Back then, it was altogether normal for women to stay home and raise children while the men worked late into the night. But hyperfocusing all of your life-energy on raising kids wasn’t necessarily healthy for anyone involved. Taken too far, it could be a recipe for toxicity: absentee fathers and over-protective mothers. And what did you do with yourself when your kids left the nest?

As I grew up, I came to see ikigai as a double-edged sword. You were supposed to have one, right? So if you didn’t, it could lead to a lot of doubt and self-recrimination. So-and-so has their ikigai, why not me? It was a precursor to how social media exacerbates feelings of alienation, hopelessness, anxiety, and depression among young people today. We all go through periods of trying to find ourselves, and not only when we’re young. It is all too easy to slip into a toxically comparative mindset – seeing those with ikigai as bright, joyful, and promising, and those without one as somehow dark, gloomy, lacking.

One psychiatrist, writing on the Japanese health website Nikkei Gooday, goes so far as to declare that “the preconception that one must have an ikigai in their life is problematic.” They continue, “we can live without an ikigai. We were born for the purpose of living. That means our lives have meaning in and of themselves.” I wholeheartedly agree. And it is incredibly important to spread the word, for Japan, this supposed bastion of “ikigai,” has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world.

Although the overall numbers have declined from their peak in 1999, when the nation recorded a tragically high 33,048 suicides, the proportion of young citizens – defined as ten to nineteen years of age – among them has been rising steadily. A 2020 report listed suicide as the top cause of death for Japanese between the ages of 15 and 39. And in fact 2024 marked the worst year for suicide among young people since 1980.

This is why seeing my government’s encouraging of young people to seek out “ikigai” (quotes intentional) gives me very mixed feelings. Of course, it’s good to encourage others to seek out their passions. But regardless of what people outside of Japan may think – and I don’t blame them, given how “ikigai” is used in English these days – Japan certainly doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on ikigai, if the ongoing mental health crisis is any indication. And I’m not sure a website promoting a foreign book on the topic is going to fix it.

When I was studying English, I had my hands full memorizing grammar and vocabulary, so I never really paid much attention to differences between languages. But as I gained more experience and became truly bilingual, I realized the tools of grammar and vocab are useful but far from oorumaiti (“almighty,” another loanword.) Equally crucial is understanding the cultural context of expressions. Without that, you can be a walking dictionary and still run into misunderstandings.

Take the Japanese word faito. This is another loanword, as it originates in the English word “fight.” But it is also wasei eigo, because Japanese use it in a totally different way from English speakers. English dictionaries describe “fight” as “using physical force to try to defeat another person or group of people.” But faito has nothing to do with violence. In fact, it is entirely positive! Because the fight isn’t against other people; it’s against yourself, the inner weakness that might hold you back from achieving something. I was on the girls’ handball team in high school. We would always shout faito! to cheer ourselves through the pain of strength training. When someone missed a shot or something, we’d shout donmai! (another loanword: “don’t mind”), then faito! to keep the team focused on the goal.

You can see a classic example of this in a 1982 commercial for a popular energy drink. Two men – one of whom is Hiroyuki Sanada of Shogun fame, sprint along a beach and shout Faito! Ippatsu! (which might be rendered as “DO IT IN ONE!”) Faito was one of the first words I knew to be cautious about in English. When I went to study abroad I remember telling myself to hold back and not shout “FIGHT!” when cheering my school’s basketball team.

All of which is to say, “ikigai” and ikigai have pretty much the same relationship as “fight” and faito! In the West, “ikigai” is all about unleashing your inner potential, while in Japan, ikigai is more like a tool for survival. None of this is to say that “ikigai” is bad and ikigai is good. They’re just different, and yet another example of how words can change when absorbed into other languages. I’m just saying it’s important to keep those differences in mind.

So you might want to be careful using “ikigai” around native speakers of Japanese. They will undoubtedly laugh and nod along when you use the term to describe your passion for work. But they aren’t laughing at you. They’re laughing with you. Because it’s all good. It’s like that psychiatrist said: life is precious, and living has meaning in and of itself. Everything else? That’s just a plus alpha.