失われた生き甲斐と高齢化社会Japan's Lost Ikigai and the Struggles of an Aging Society

I feel that the modern societies of the advanced nations, Japan included, share a common problem. Unable to keep up with the many factors changing at astonishing speed, AI and cutting-edge medicine among them, people lose themselves and find it hard to understand their “mission,” what they are to accomplish in life. Seen from the essence of human life and the state of the soul, this is an extremely troublesome problem.

That the traditional Japanese philosophy of ikigai has lately drawn attention in the West is one sign of how many people have reached a dead end in these times.

But we have to understand that the keyword “ikigai” is a philosophy of the past, one contemporary Japanese people have lost entirely as well. It is extremely rare to meet a Japanese person who actually understands their own ikigai and lives each day with joy.

My father, for example, is 68 and still runs his own company, working every day and thriving. Most of the people of his age around him, though, have already retired (the retirement age in Japan used to be 60 and has now been raised to 65), and listening to them, I can see that they carry many problems.

This generation was born as Japan's high economic growth began after the Second World War. They enjoyed a very fortunate life from childhood, and by the time they started working, it was the golden age of the unprecedented bubble economy (1985–1997), when the Japanese economy threatened the standing of the United States.

It now seems like a story from a distant, different country, but the Japanese of that time reveled in great prosperity, and the people who lived through it had a fierce drive toward the future.

So my father, like many, worked from morning to night, and I hardly saw him at home. This memory is common to my generation (born in 1990 and 1991) and shows how normal it was for our parents' generation to give everything to work. In other words, work was their “ikigai.”

But this bubble economy was an economy swollen beyond real strength amid the sharp rise of the yen and the financial arrangements that followed the Plaza Accord of 1985. Some readers will remember the Japan-bashing of those years.

From around 1991 the Japanese economy began to unravel rapidly. After the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995, which had an enormous psychological impact, the bubble ended in 1997 with the symbolic collapse of Yamaichi Securities. Over the thirty years since, Japan has become extremely worn down, and its former vitality has faded.

The years around 1990, when the bubble economy was taken for real strength and the power to create the future was let go, were also a turning point at which the world situation changed greatly. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany set worldwide globalization in motion, and in 1995 Windows 95 was released, opening a new era.

But most of Japanese society at the time, overconfident in a strength that was swollen beyond substance, dismissed the world's new currents as short-lived fads and turned toward a national “withdrawal” into itself.

This is the cause of the exhaustion called the “Lost Thirty Years” in Japan. And this national withdrawal had an enormous effect on people who had until then worked with a tough drive.

It was the loss of ikigai on a national scale. They began to criticize themselves: what had they worked so hard for? They lost hope and ideals for the future, and gave up facing the essence of life, the question of why they were born.

As a result, apart from the few like my father who still work with vigor, a large number of people say after retirement, “I don't know what to do.” And in fact they do nothing, spending their time until they die. Anyone can imagine how heavily this weighs on Japan's future.

If we call this generation the “generation that lost its ikigai,” it is the overwhelming majority of Japan's population. Their exhaustion is having a serious effect on the young generation, people like us.

Because the majority are people who do nothing and refuse to let the present change, and their wishes bear directly on political policy. As a result, the possibilities of young people who want to create the future have been crushed. This is the true cause of Japan's decline.

Interestingly, I have recently been asked for advice by this generation more and more. I think it is because in me, living each day with my own ikigai and an understanding of my mission in life, they see something precious they have lost.

Without being misled by “ikigai” as a catchy buzzword, we need to reconsider history and ask how the Japanese of the past actually lived their lives. Year by year I feel strongly a responsibility to present this from Japan, which has entered the world's first super-aged society, and not only to the West.

This is because it is a near-future international issue, and it will be a serious matter especially for the European countries heading toward aging societies as Japan has.