In this video, Nick Kemp dives into the fascinating cultural contrasts between Japan and the West, focusing on the concepts of yarigai (worth doing) and ikigai. In Japan, actions are often valued for their worthiness rather than their pleasure, contrasting with Western tendencies to prioritize enjoyment. Nick explores how ikigai is deeply personal—sometimes a private, modest purpose, or, in other cases, a grand, life-defining goal akin to kokorozashi.
Ikigai is something worth doing
Nick: That word yarigai is really interesting, because that's far more common. I mean, it's very common. It reminds me of how Japanese tend to perceive things as either worth doing or not worth doing.
Maybe in the West, we kind of perceive things, ‘Is it going to be enjoyable or pleasurable? Or if it's too much hard work, I won't do it.’ And so that's one word, I think, probably be needed to be understood, in order to understand ikigai.
There's this idea in Japan that either things are worth doing, or not worth doing, and whether it's going to be pleasant or not really doesn't matter. And then your ikigai is something more private and personal. You can keep to yourself or can be highly ambitious, maybe more like a kokorozashi, this, big life-defining goal you're gonna commit your life to.
What's interesting, though, there is a lot of research, there's been many papers written by Japanese and non-Japanese. And so it seems to link to things like existential positive psychology, philosophy. It's something, I guess, teachable, coachable to some degree.
But in the West, I think we like to, we talked about this in the West, we kind of have this Western lens, and we either romanticize foreign concepts, or we think we can understand them from a Venn diagram or from a one-minute conversation. And then have the desire to share it with others because it seems so special and unique.