History of ikigai: from Mieko Kamiya to the four circles

When I talk about ikigai in a workshop or in the book, I always start from the same name, Mieko Kamiya. Not because she invented the word, which is much older, but because she was the first person who sat down to study seriously what it is that makes a life worth living. Between her book and the four-circle poster circulating on the internet today lie more than fifty years and quite a few misunderstandings. This is the journey, in order.

An old word

Ikigai (生き甲斐) joins two pieces. Iki means “life” or “being alive”, and kai, which within the word sounds like gai, means “effect”, “worth”, what makes something worthwhile. Psychologist Akihiro Hasegawa, of Toyo Eiwa University, links that kai to shells, which were highly valued in the Heian period (794-1185). That is where the idea of “worth of living” carried inside the word comes from.

For centuries it was an everyday Japanese expression, with no theory behind it. People said a job, a child or a hobby was someone’s ikigai, much as in English we might say something “keeps them going”. Nobody had yet turned it into an object of study.

1966: Mieko Kamiya

Mieko Kamiya (1914-1979) was a psychiatrist. She trained between Japan and Geneva, translated Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations into Japanese and devoted much of her professional life to the Nagashima Aiseien sanatorium, where leprosy patients lived in isolation. There she spent years alongside people from whom illness and isolation had taken almost everything most of us consider a reason to live.

From that experience came Ikigai ni tsuite (“On ikigai” or “On the meaning of life”), published in 1966 by Misuzu Shobō. It is the first in-depth study of the concept and is still the reference text in Japan.

Kamiya distinguishes two levels. On one hand, whatever gives meaning to a life, whether a person, a task or a belief. On the other, the intimate feeling that your life is worth something, which she called ikigai-kan. What she describes is not a great mission reserved for a few. That meaning often appears in small things, in having a place and a task, in feeling that someone is counting on you.

Inoue: two sides and three types

Decades later, Japanese psychologist Katsuya Inoue took up that double view from the psychology of ageing. As the English Wikipedia reports, drawing on his 2000 handbook, Inoue understands ikigai as two things at once. There are the sources or objects that bring value or meaning to life, and there is the feeling that your life has value precisely because those sources exist.

Inoue also proposes classifying ikigai according to its relationship with others.

• Social ikigai. The kind society accepts and recognises, such as volunteering or community life.
• Non-social ikigai. The kind that doesn’t depend on society, such as faith or self-discipline.
• Antisocial ikigai. The kind sustained by dark emotions, such as the desire to hate someone or something.

The third category is the least cited and perhaps the most honest. It reminds us that some people are kept on their feet by something that doesn’t do them good, a grudge or a wound, and that this too works as a reason to keep going.

What came next in research

In 1996, anthropologist Gordon Matthews compared how Japanese and Americans explain what makes their lives worth living, and confirmed what Kamiya had described. The ikigai his interviewees spoke of was everyday and varied, linked above all to work or family.

Medicine took an interest too. In 2008, a study of more than forty thousand adults in Japan’s Ohsaki cohort found that those who said they had no ikigai had higher mortality during follow-up. Later, neuroscientist Ken Mogi explained it to an international audience as something made of small joys, far from a grand mission.

How it reached the West

The version almost everyone knows today has a different origin. In 2009, writer Dan Buettner mentioned ikigai in a talk about longevity in Okinawa. In 2011, Spanish author Andrés Zuzunaga published a four-circle diagram about purpose, unrelated to ikigai. In 2014, British blogger Marc Winn put the two together, placed the word ikigai at the centre of the diagram, and the image went viral.

The book by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, published in Spanish in 2016 and in English the following year, sealed that association worldwide. Since then, for many people ikigai is the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. The full story of the diagram is in this article.

What this history tells us

Laid out in order, the journey shows a clear shift. Kamiya and Inoue spoke of something felt, something that can live in the smallest things. The Western diagram turned it into something you achieve when four conditions line up, money included. They are two different ideas under the same word.

Inoue’s two sides closely resemble the distinction I work with at IKIGAIER. The sources or objects that give life value correspond to what I do, build and contribute: Active Ikigai. The feeling that my life is worth something corresponds to where I live it from: Conscious Ikigai. You can have plenty of the first and very little of the second, and it is in that gap that the sense of something missing tends to appear.

If you want to see the three layers separately —what is Japanese, what the West added and IKIGAIER’s own perspective— they are brought together in the guide what is ikigai.

Sources