Ryukyuan Shuri Castle, 2019

In this project we are dealing with a phenomenon that has been gaining more and more popularity lately, the ikigai, i.e. finding the purpose of life as seen in the context of Japanese society and a Western, reconceptualized lifestyle discourse.  

The notion of ikigai has spread following the longevity studies within the Blue Zones project, which was initiated by Dan Buettner. One of five extraordinarily long-lived communities Buettner had discovered in his expeditions was Okinawa. My goal is to investigate in how far the ideas of longevity, as well as the lifestyle that it entails, are present in today’s urban areas of Okinawa. 

Originally stemming from rural folk and linked with two other phenomena – moai, a friendly interconnectedness within a social group and hara hachi bu, moderate dining – ikigai as a concept of life crystallized itself at the crossroads of what a man loves, what he does well, what the society needs, and ultimately what he can be paid for. It is through the union of these three elements (ikigai, moai and hara hachi bu) that Okinawans explain their longevity. They are never alone, they make a living doing what they like and they eat in moderation. This leads to a feeling of happiness which permeates their everyday life, marked by an interconnectedness, shedding of the illusory “I” and mirroring of oneself in others. It is mainly the elderly who are aware of the benefits of ikigai, but they are quick to add that one of the reasons for their longevity is (perhaps surprisingly) the enormous suffering they had to go through after WWII and the battle of Okinawa, while the young nowadays are less concerned with longevity and more with securing their bare existence. This is getting increasingly difficult, as more and more young people are choosing city life over rural life, which is much more competitive, stressful and devoid of personal interconnectedness, moai. Furthermore, healthy foods have gradually been replaced by American fast food and Naha, Okinawa’s capital is now bursting with a multitude of offers of that kind.      

Apart from ikigai, there is another phenomenon I wish to draw attention to known as kodokushi, which is often ignored in both Japanese and Western discourse. Kodokushi means “lonely death” and refers to the ever-growing number of unaccompanied deaths of elderly people who die in complete self-neglect and solitude because they have no friends or family to take care of them. Most victims of kodokushi are males, while the most common cause of death is cardiac issues, as they are unable to afford proper medical care. Their corpses often remain undiscovered for months, sometimes even years, because there is nobody to inquire about their disappearance. In many cases, it is the stench of the decomposed body that prompts neighbours to alert the police who then break into the apartment and find the deceased.

The lonely deaths phenomenon has given rise to companies that specialize in cleaning up after kodokushi. This has actually become a rather lucrative business practised even by Buddhist monks. After cleaning and clearing out the apartments of the deceased, items that are left behind such as clothes and household appliances are then resold to Africa or the Philippines.

However, kodokushi is not just a problem among the elderly. Hikikomori, which can be translated as “acute social withdrawal”, is a condition that affects young people who seclude themselves completely from the outside world and lock themselves up in their rooms for many years at a time. Money and shelter are provided for them by their parents, while they keep their social interactions to an absolute minimum as they are plagued by fears and unable to reintegrate into society. It can be assumed that these people will increase the numbers of kodokushi in the future when their parents die and nobody is left to take care of them. 

As we can see, kodokushi and hikikomori represent a stark contrast to the idealized and romanticized concept of ikigai. The goal of this project is to explore the reasons for such contradictions marking the Japanese society, their background and where the Japanese see potential solutions to the problem of kodokushi and hikikomori. Could ikigai perhaps play a role here?