The Pursuit of a Life Worth Living in Japan and the United States

Abstract

What makes life worth living? Why do we go on with life? These questions are matters of individual psychology, but they are also cultural and social: selves and society ever construct and justify one another. Most selves in a given society find life worth living along certain paths, such as work and family; society, in turn, provides means through which selves can construct and legitimate their lives as lives worth living. Based on extensive interviewing of a hundred Japanese and Americans as to their senses of their lives, this article compares how Japanese and Americans pursue lives worth living within cultural realms and social and institutional structures of their different societies. The Japanese term means, broadly, that which most makes one's life seem worth living. Japanese surveys consistently show that most common of women is family and children; most common of men is work and as well as family. However, many books and articles written about in Japan in recent years show considerable conflict over whether should involve one's complete commitment to work or family, or rather, one's pursuit of one's own individual fulfillment. One commentator claims that the husband should work zealously to support his family; wife should guard over family, help her husband, and superbly raise her children.... This is path to true ikigai (Niwano 1969:130-31, 119-20). Another commentator questions such as based in role: However good a mother you may appear to be in others' eyes, if you act as a mother only from ... custom or duty, being a mother cannot be your ikigai (Kamiya 1980:80). Still another asserts [Company employees] may think of their work as ... but they may be but `work robots' ... who cannot say that they've ever really (Kobayashi 1989:20, 53, 55). This dispute over is undergirded by Japan's affluence - with a comfortable standard of living available almost all, work and family, company and children may no longer seem sufficient many as basis a life worth living - and also by Japan's aging: millions who once lived work or family, company or children now find themselves retired with no role left to play, no left to live for, as numerous recent Japanese newspaper reports discuss.(2) No term exactly equivalent to exists in United States, but dispute in Japanese print media over meaning of seems paralleled in American print media in recent decades. Popular books such as Passages discuss how one must move out of roles and into (Sheehy 1977:364); books on finding one's true self, from Peck's (1978) The Road Less Traveled to Schwartz's (1995) What Really Matters, continue to be widely read. On other hand, Lasch's (1979) The Culture of Narcissism, Bellah and his coauthors' (1986) Habits of Heart, and Etzioni's (1993) The Spirit of Community disparage American preoccupation with self over all else, advocating instead a return to commitment to community. Books advocating both positions remain mainstays in American bookstores, as do their counterparts in Japanese bookstores. In both Japan and United States, there are thus ongoing mass-media debates over whether one should live self-realization or commitment to group. These debates serve to provide some of cultural materials used by Japanese and Americans in justifying and legitimating their lives. Underlying these debates, however, there seems to be a broadly common sense of as what one most deeply lives for in two societies. Healthy human beings, Japanese books and articles on all say, should have ikigai; and although many Japanese express initial confusion over ikigai, most can quickly enough tell you, My is my children, or My is my company, or My is to live with my own individual purpose. In United States, concept of what one lives for lacks cultural salience of in Japan, yet can be clearly enough seen in statements by Americans such as, I can't live without her, My kids are everything to me, I live my life God, or I live my dream of becoming a truly happy person. …