Ikigai Meaning: What the Word Really Means in Japan (and What the Diagram Gets Wrong)

Ikigai (pronounced ee-kee-guy) is a Japanese word made of iki, meaning life, and gai, meaning worth or value. The usual translation is "a reason to get up in the morning". In everyday Japanese it is small and plural: a grandchild, a garden, a Saturday football match, a good cup of coffee. It is not one grand purpose, and it does not have to earn you money or change the world. That version, the four overlapping circles you have seen on LinkedIn, was drawn in Spain and renamed in Guernsey. The Japanese word is older, softer and far more useful.

This page explains what the word actually means, where the diagram came from, how ikigai differs from purpose and passion, what the health research found, and a twenty-minute exercise for finding yours. If you want the book, our Ikigai summary covers it in twelve minutes.

Ikigai meaning in Japanese: the word, the kanji and how people use it

Ikigai is written 生き甲斐. The first part, iki, comes from the verb ikiru, to live. The second part, kai, becomes gai when joined, and means worth, or the result that makes an effort worthwhile. You hear the same ending in yarigai, the worth of doing something, and hatarakigai, the worth of working. So the plainest translation is "what makes life worth living".

There is a popular story about the second half. The psychologist Akihiro Hasegawa argues that gai traces back to kai, meaning shell. In the Heian period, aristocrats played kai-awase, a shell-matching game with hand-painted shells so expensive that the word for shell came to stand for value itself. It is a lovely story, though the standard kanji for gai in ikigai is not the shell character, so treat it as plausible rather than settled.

The modern sense of the word was shaped by Mieko Kamiya, a psychiatrist who worked with leprosy patients at the Nagashima Aiseien sanatorium and published Ikigai ni Tsuite (On the Meaning of Life) in 1966. The book has never been translated into English, which is partly why the Western version drifted so far. Kamiya made a distinction still in use: the ikigai taisho, the source of ikigai (this child, this work, this garden), and the ikigai-kan, the feeling those sources give you.

Ordinary usage is small. A 2025 Sony Life Insurance survey of 1,400 Japanese people, teens to seventies, found the average person named eight or nine sources of ikigai; the most common was good food, then travel, hot springs and music. A grandmother says her grandchild is her ikigai. A man says fishing on Sundays is his. Nobody asks whether it pays.

The ikigai diagram: where it came from and what it gets wrong

The four-circle image, with "what you love", "what you are good at", "what the world needs" and "what you can be paid for" overlapping on the word ikigai, is the most shared picture of the concept and the least Japanese thing about it.

It began in Barcelona. In 2011 Andres Zuzunaga, a Spanish writer and psychological astrologer, drew a Venn diagram about purpose (proposito). It appeared in print in 2012, in Borja Vilaseca's book Que Harias Si No Tuvieras Miedo. Ikigai was not mentioned.

Then in May 2014, Marc Winn, a blogger and coach based in Guernsey, watched Dan Buettner's TED talk on the world's longest-lived communities, which included Okinawa and the word ikigai. He took Zuzunaga's diagram, replaced "purpose" with "ikigai", and published a short post titled "What's your ikigai?". It went round the world. Winn later wrote, candidly, that he had changed one word on a diagram. Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles then reproduced it in their 2016 book.

What it gets wrong is the two lower circles. "What the world needs" and "what you can be paid for" are Western career questions. They turn ikigai into a job hunt and imply a reason for living must be useful to others and pay. Kamiya's book contains nothing like this, and a Japanese retiree whose ikigai is her allotment would fail the test. The diagram also suggests you have one ikigai, at the centre. Most people have several, and they change.

What is still useful: the upper half. "What you love" and "what you are good at" is a fair place to begin, as long as you ignore the bottom and expect a modest answer.

Ikigai vs purpose vs passion vs hygge

Concept	Origin	What it means	Scale
Ikigai	Japanese, everyday usage; formalised by Mieko Kamiya in 1966	The things that make your life feel worth living and get you up in the morning	Small and plural: a person, a hobby, a routine; several at once, changing over life
Purpose	Western philosophy and psychology; Viktor Frankl, modern career coaching	A direction your life is for; a contribution you are here to make	Large and singular: one purpose, often tied to work or legacy
Passion	Latin root, Romantic era; popular in career advice since the 1990s	A strong feeling for an activity, with intensity and absorption	Medium, emotional, can burn out; one or two at a time
Hygge	Danish and Norwegian	Cosiness and warm contentment in the moment, usually shared: candles, food, friends	Small and momentary; an atmosphere, not a reason

Ikigai sits closest to hygge in size and closest to purpose in function. It is a reason, like purpose, but a small one, like hygge, and you are allowed many.

Ikigai examples from real life

The examples below are deliberately ordinary. If yours sounds like a mission statement, it is probably not an ikigai.

• A grandmother whose ikigai is the Wednesday afternoon she collects her grandson from school. She plans the week around it.
• A father who coaches the under-nines on Saturday mornings. He is not a good coach. He is there every week.
• A nurse on nights whose ikigai is the twenty minutes with a book and a coffee before the children wake.
• A retired engineer who repairs bicycles for the neighbours' children, for free, in his garage.
• A mother of three who sings in a choir on Tuesday evenings and has not missed a term in nine years.
• An accountant whose ikigai is a vegetable patch the size of a dining table, and the first tomato each year.
• A man in his eighties who walks the same two kilometres every morning and knows every dog on the route by name.
• A teenager learning Korean from videos, an hour a night, with no plan to use it for anything.
• A widow who runs the WhatsApp group for her street and makes sure every new arrival gets a knock on the door.
• A software developer who bakes bread on Sunday because the kneading is the only hour nobody can interrupt.

None of these pays. Two or three serve the world, in a very small way. All of them are a reason to get up.

How to find your ikigai: a 20-minute exercise

The neuroscientist Ken Mogi, in The Little Book of Ikigai (2017), describes five pillars of ikigai: starting small, releasing yourself, harmony and sustainability, the joy of little things, and being in the here and now. This exercise walks through them. You need a piece of paper and twenty minutes, which is one nap or one episode of something you were not watching anyway.

1. List the small things (starting small). 5 minutes. Write down everything in an ordinary week that you would miss if it were taken away. Not achievements. Things. The coffee, the walk, the Saturday call to your sister, the ten minutes of a podcast in the car. Aim for ten. Most people stall at four and then get to twelve.
2. Cross out the ones for other people (releasing yourself). 3 minutes. Mogi's second pillar is about letting go of the self you perform for others. Go down the list and cross out anything you would not do if nobody ever knew. What is left is yours.
3. Mark the shared ones (harmony and sustainability). 2 minutes. Put a circle next to anything that involves other people or a place you belong to: a group, a street, a team, a family ritual. The Okinawan elders in the Ikigai book had their moai, a lifelong friendship group; this is the same pillar. Items with a circle are the ones that last.
4. Notice the sensory ones (the joy of little things). 2 minutes. Put a star next to anything you enjoy with your body: taste, warmth, movement, music, the smell of a garden. Japanese ikigai leans heavily on these. If you have no stars, add one, because you have been living in your head.
5. Find the absorbing ones (being in the here and now). 3 minutes. Put a tick next to anything during which you lose track of time. This is flow, and Mogi treats it as ikigai in the present tense. Items with a tick are the ones to protect first.
6. Choose three and put them in the diary. 5 minutes. Pick three items with the most marks. Write down when, this week, each one happens, and what you will say no to so that it does. That is the whole exercise. You have not found a purpose. You have found three reasons to get up, which is what the word means.

Ikigai and health: what the Ohsaki study found

The best-known evidence is the Ohsaki study, published by Toshimasa Sone and colleagues at Tohoku University in Psychosomatic Medicine in 2008. It followed 43,391 adults aged 40 to 79 in the Ohsaki area of Miyagi prefecture for seven years. Each was asked one question: do you have ikigai in your life? About 59 percent said yes, 36 percent were not sure, and under 5 percent said no.

Over the seven years, 3,048 of them died. After adjusting for age, sex, education, body weight, smoking, drinking, exercise, illness and perceived stress, people who said they had no ikigai were about 1.5 times as likely to die as those who said yes. The gap was largest for cardiovascular disease and for external causes, which includes suicide. There was no clear link with cancer.

The caveat matters. This is correlation. People already ill, lonely or depressed are less likely to report ikigai, so some of the effect runs backwards. The study adjusted for what it could, but one yes-or-no question cannot separate the two. What it does show is that feeling life is worth living tracks closely with staying alive, which is reason enough to protect yours.

The Ikigai book: is it worth reading?

Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles, is the book that put the word on every airport shelf. It is a short, calm account of interviews with the oldest residents of Ogimi in Okinawa, with chapters on flow, Frankl, Morita therapy, diet and resilience.

Our verdict: read it as a one-evening reset at a turning point, such as a new baby or retirement, and take its five habits seriously: a close friendship group, light eating, gentle daily movement, work you never fully retire from, and losing yourself in a task. Skip it if you want evidence or method; the research is anecdotal and, awkwardly for a book about a Japanese word, it reproduces the Western diagram without explaining its origin. The useful part fits in our twelve-minute Ikigai summary.

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