Book review
Ikigai-ni-Tsuite (生きがいについて)
Mieko Kamiya
The foundational psychiatric study of ikigai — published in Japanese in 1966, still largely untranslated. Kamiya was a psychiatrist at the Nagashima Aiseien leprosarium in Okayama; she watched patients whose external lives had been forcibly stripped reconstruct a reason to wake up, and built a clinical theory from what she observed. Forty years before the West translated her work, she had already named the distinction between ikigai-no-taishō (the object that gives meaning) and ikigai-kan (the felt sense of having meaning).
5 min guide