生甲斐 ikigai Reason For Being

What makes your life worth the living, and the thing that makes it so: a child, your work, an aim. It is an everyday Japanese word, built on 甲斐 (kai), an old native noun for the worth an act turns out to have had. In the classical books Japan's national library has indexed, it is mostly said in the negative, of a life not worth the living; the positive is in print by 1838, and from the 1890s Japanese translators of foreign books used it to call a life worth living. In the surveys one anthropologist reports, people over thirty found it in their work or in family and children, and people in their twenties in leisure or in dreams of work or marriage. The psychiatrist Kamiya Mieko wrote a whole book about it in 1966. The four-circle diagram that travels with the word in English, what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, is not the word: it was drawn in 2011 for the Spanish word for purpose and given the Japanese name in 2014. The Japanese asks only whether living is worth it, and names what makes it so; which thing that is, for you, is yours.

A native Japanese word: its earliest example in the 日本国語大辞典 is the fourteenth-century war chronicle 太平記, where it is said in the negative, of a life not worth the living.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 生甲斐.

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