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“These challenges taught me valuable lessons and helped me grow personally and professionally. We gained a deeper understanding of our strengths and weaknesses, and we honed our problem-solving skills. Moreover, these experiences allowed us to develop a broader perspective and expand our knowledge and capabilities. We learn to adapt to new situations and think creatively to overcome challenges. We discover the significance of collaboration and effective communication in achieving our goals.”

“The participants gave me the idea of losing ikigai, maintaining ikigai, recovering ikigai, or finding new ikigai. Ikigai becomes very dynamic, because it’s either lost or maintained or recovered. A lot of participants told me that during the crisis, and also after the crisis, nature was the kind of connector, and this is how I ended up being so interested on environmental issues, and sustainability, and perceptions of climate change crisis, and what does the connection of people with nature have to do with their well-being?

So during the crisis, they felt that connecting to nature helped to overcome the crisis. And after the crisis, still appreciating nature was something that was very much rooted in people’s experiences.”

“So when I started making the film when I was in high school, the comedy detective film, and showed it to people in my school, and made people laugh, that empowered me. And I felt something special about making something out of nothing. So filmmaking became my ikigai. But when I started working on carving the divine, it’s not ikigai anymore.”

“In today’s world, many people try to grow and grow and grow. They think growth is always important. Once you reach one level, then you need to grow farther. But for me, once you’re comfortable, then maybe you move to the next phase of helping others to grow, or working on your other areas of life, and so on. Just limit the growth, and then be satisfied with your own lot is taru wo shiru.

And in fact, if everybody practises taru wo shiru, then the world becomes more sustainable. Because we can sustain a kind of wealth of comfortable level for each individual, but we cannot sustain the planet if a few people want to gain so much wealth. That’s impossible.”

“We need about 30 different kinds of fibre a week, which is a lot, because if we think of fibre, we think of vegetables. But how many vegetables do you eat regularly? Maybe 10. But that is quite difficult to find only from vegetables. But there is this system in Japan called Mago Wa Yasashii.

So Mago Wa Yasashii, basically, you consume a lot of beans, a lot of nuts and seeds, a lot of seaweeds, fish, vegetables, mushrooms, and potatoes. Except for fish, they all contain a lot of fibre. You can easily find 30 different kinds of fibre if you use Mago Wa Yasashii.”

“The way I see it, ikigai is a body and mind experience that occurs when participants reflect on it and connect it with certain aspects of their lives. The body is both a natural pre-reflective self and an important medium for reflexivity, therefore, thinking, perceiving, imagining, and feeling ikigai experience are all parts of bodily knowledge.

If we are to study phenomenons like ikigai and its experience, we need to place the body at its centre, because this experience comes from people’s perceptions, orientation and engagement with the world and requires body knowledge to embody and make sense of itself and its interrelated dimensions.”

“Because of just all the changes I’ve made in my life, I just had finally moved into a moment in my life where I thought, I just want stability, I don’t want drama. I just want to enjoy my family and just do my thing. But I realised that the work that I was doing wasn’t the work that I enjoyed doing and didn’t believe in it. I didn’t want to continue doing it. And I just felt, I just felt pretty lost.

And somebody, somebody that I met on LinkedIn, I think the purpose was for her to tell me about your course. I started researching, what’s this ikigai? I saw it as an opportunity to learn to ground myself, to just stop for a moment and think: Where am I going to go next? What’s going to happen? But first, I need that grounding.” – Ariadne Ferro

“So I never really thought about my ikigai sources until you hear the word ikigai, and then it’s all you can think about. I would say for me, I have multiple sources of ikigai. One thing that really provides me with a sense of it is looking back on my day and knowing I’ve accomplished something.

Another thing that gives me ikigai is dancing. So just living in that experience in the body, getting lost in it, completely engaging in that activity. And that also lends itself to progress as well.” – Natasha Randall

Kiku Day is a shakuhachi player, a PhD ethnomusicologist, and a world traveller from Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work lies at the intersections of performance of traditional shakuhachi music, contemporary music and improvisation, ethnomusicology, history, politics, meditation, and writing. She studied shakuhachi with Okuda Atsuya, one of the foremost performers of jinashi shakuhachi, in Tokyo, Japan for 11 years before returning to Europe to study ethnomusicology at School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London.

Benjamin Boas is an American author, translator, and contemporary Japanese culture consultant. He is both the Cool Japan Ambassador for the Japanese government and a Tourism Ambassador for the Nakano ward in Tokyo. He is the author of From Cool Japan to Your Japan and two other Japanese-language books about intercultural education and has written for Studio Ghibli, The Japan Times, and many other publications.