「生きがい」という言葉ほど、訳しように訳せない日本語も珍しい。英語に直そうにも、purposeでもreason to liveでもしっくりこず、結局そのままikigaiと書かれることが多い。近年では、英語の辞書にもそのままの形で項目が立つに至った。
Few Japanese words resist translation as stubbornly as ikigai. Try to render it in English and neither "purpose" nor "reason to live" quite fits, so it usually ends up written as ikigai in the original. In recent years it has even earned its own entry in English dictionaries in that unchanged form.
語源を辿れば、動詞「生きる」に「甲斐」という古語が結びついた合成語である。「甲斐」とは、行為に見合うだけの値打ちのことを意味する。つまり生きがいとは、生きるという営みそのものに釣り合うだけの手応えを指していると言ってよい。
Trace the etymology and you find a compound: the verb ikiru, "to live," joined to the old word kai, meaning the worthwhileness commensurate with an act. Kai is, in short, the value something earns by being done. Ikigai, then, points to the felt weight that matches the act of living itself.
この概念を学問として正面から扱った最初の本は、精神科医神谷美恵子が一九六六年に世に出した『生きがいについて』であった。彼女がハンセン病の療養所で患者たちと向き合った長い歳月の中から紡ぎ出された言葉は、半世紀以上を経てもなお新鮮な響きを失っていない。生きがいとは、未来への希望でもあれば、過去への納得でもあり、現在の充足でもあるという。何かひとつに還元しようとしてできるものではないのだと、彼女は繰り返し書いている。
The first book to treat the concept as a serious subject of inquiry was On Ikigai, published in 1966 by the psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya. The words she drew from the long years she spent facing patients at a leprosy sanatorium have lost none of their freshness more than half a century on. Ikigai, she wrote, is hope for the future, reconciliation with the past, and fulfillment in the present all at once. It is not, she insisted again and again, something that can be reduced to any single one of these.
岡山県の山あいに、田中さんという八十四歳の農家がいる。毎朝五時には起き、まだ薄暗い畑に出て、トマトやナスの様子を見て回るのが日課である。腰は曲がり、指は土に染まって黒い。それでも畑に立つときの彼の表情は、不思議なほど若々しい。
Deep in the mountains of Okayama Prefecture lives an eighty-four-year-old farmer named Mr. Tanaka. Every morning at five he rises, walks out into the still-dim field, and makes his rounds among the tomatoes and eggplants. His back is bent, his fingers black with earth. And yet, when he stands in his field, his face is mysteriously young.
「畑があるから、朝が来るのが楽しみでね」と田中さんは笑う。年金だけでも暮らせるが、収穫した野菜を近所に配って回ること、その「ありがとう」のひとことが何より嬉しいのだという。生きがいとは、こうした日々の小さな循環の中に宿るものなのかもしれない。
"The field is what makes me look forward to morning," Mr. Tanaka laughs. He could live on his pension alone, but distributing the harvest among his neighbors, and that one word "thank you" he gets in return, is what brings him the deepest joy. Ikigai, perhaps, lives precisely in such small daily cycles.
一方、東京で働く二十四歳のイラストレーター佐藤さんは、まったく別の角度から生きがいを語る。締め切りに追われる夜中、ペンを走らせている瞬間、時間が消える感覚があるのだという。「描き始めるが早いか、気づけば朝になっているんです」と彼女は言う。
A very different angle comes from Ms. Sato, a twenty-four-year-old illustrator working in Tokyo. In the middle of the night, racing a deadline, pen flying across the page, she says she has the sensation that time simply disappears. "The moment I start drawing, the next thing I know it's morning," she says.
世間からすれば不安定極まりない働き方ではあるが、佐藤さんに後悔はないらしい。月末の家賃の支払いに四苦八苦する日々ではあるものの、絵を描かない人生など考えるだに息苦しいのだそうだ。若い世代における生きがいは、しばしばこうした没入の喜びと結びついている。
By any conventional standard her line of work is wildly precarious, but Ms. Sato seems to have no regrets. Even on the days when scraping together the end-of-month rent is a real struggle, the very thought of a life without drawing leaves her gasping for air. For her generation, ikigai is often bound up with this kind of immersive joy.
近年、海外で「ikigaiダイアグラム」なるものが大流行している。「好きなこと」「得意なこと」「世の中が必要としていること」「お金になること」の四つの円が交わる中心に生きがいがあると説く図である。しかし、これは厳密に言えば日本における伝統的な生きがい観とはかなり異なるものだ。
In recent years the so-called "ikigai diagram" has become hugely popular overseas. It is the chart that places ikigai at the intersection of four circles: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Strictly speaking, however, this is quite far from the traditional Japanese view of ikigai.
神谷美恵子の議論を踏まえて言えば、生きがいは必ずしも収入や社会的成功を要件とはしない。むしろ報酬を度外視してもなお続けたいと思える何かこそが、本来の生きがいに近い。西洋的な合理性で図式化しようにも、本来は割り切れない感情の領域なのである。
Building on Kamiya's argument, ikigai does not, in principle, require income or social success at all. What comes closer to the original sense is something you would want to keep doing even setting aside any reward. Try to capture it on a Western rationalist diagram and you cannot — it belongs, fundamentally, to a region of feeling that resists tidy division.
沖縄の大宜味村に、百歳を超える長寿者の親睦会がある。村の集会所に集まり、三線を弾き、歌い、近況を語り合う。研究者たちは、こうした繋がりあっての長寿だと指摘してやまない。「あの人に会わなくては」という小さな約束の積み重ねが、結果として人を生かしている。
In Ogimi Village in Okinawa there is a friendship circle for residents who have passed a hundred. They gather at the village hall, play the sanshin, sing, and share news of one another's lives. Researchers point out, untiringly, that it is precisely these bonds that make such longevity possible. The accumulation of small promises — "I have to go see her" — is, in the end, what keeps people alive.
その意味で、生きがいは一人で完結するものではない。誰かに必要とされている、誰かを気にかけているという関係性なくして、生きがいは成立しがたい。孤独死が社会問題化している現代日本において、この点はあまりに重い示唆を含んでいる。
Seen this way, ikigai is not something that can be completed in solitude. Without a relationship in which you are needed by someone, or in which you care for someone, ikigai is hard to sustain. In a contemporary Japan where lonely deaths have become a social issue, that observation carries a weight almost too heavy to bear.
戦後の高度成長期、多くの日本人男性は仕事に生きがいの一切を委ねてきた。会社のために働き、出世のために働き、家族を養うために働いた。それ自体は決して責められるべきことではないが、定年を境に、燃え尽きたように生気を失う高齢者が後を絶たない。
During the postwar high-growth era, many Japanese men entrusted every last drop of their ikigai to their jobs. They worked for the company, worked for promotion, worked to feed their families. There is nothing inherently shameful in that, yet there is no shortage of retirees who, the moment they reach mandatory retirement age, lose their vitality as if burned out.
「自分はもう、何の役にも立たない人間だ」と漏らす元会社員の声を、私は地域の福祉施設で何度も聞いた。仕事一筋で生きてきたゆえに、仕事を失ったとき、自分が誰なのかわからなくなってしまう。これは個人の問題というよりも、社会全体が背負わざるを得ない構造的な課題である。
"I'm no use to anyone anymore," I have heard former salarymen mutter, again and again, at local welfare centers. Having lived for work alone, they no longer know who they are once the work is gone. This is less an individual failing than a structural problem the society as a whole is forced to shoulder.
近年、退職後に書道や陶芸、合唱団などに新しい生きがいを見出す高齢者が増えている。横浜市の七十一歳の元銀行員は、退職を機に始めた書道で、今では地域の教室を任されるまでになった。「会社員時代より忙しいくらいですよ」と笑う表情は、現役の頃よりむしろ生き生きとしているように見える。
Recently, more and more older people are finding new ikigai after retirement in calligraphy, pottery, or community choirs. A seventy-one-year-old former banker in Yokohama took up calligraphy on retiring and now runs the local class himself. "I'm busier than I was as a salaryman," he laughs — and his face, somehow, looks more alive now than it did in his working years.
生きがいの形は、世代によっても時代によっても変わる。育児に生きがいを見出してきた母親世代があれば、推し活に救われていると公言する若者もいる。終末期医療の現場で長年働いてきたある看護師の話によれば、死を目前にした患者が口にするのは、地位や財産のことではなく、誰かと過ごした何でもない時間のことだという。
The shape of ikigai shifts with the generation and with the era. There are mothers who have found their ikigai in raising children, and there are young people who openly say their idol-fandom has saved their lives. According to a nurse who has spent many years in end-of-life care, what dying patients speak of is not status or wealth, but the perfectly ordinary hours they once spent with someone they loved.
「もっと働けばよかった」と言い残して亡くなる人はいない。海辺を妻と歩いた夕暮れ、子供の運動会の弁当、長年通った喫茶店のマスターとの何気ない会話。そうした、当時は何の意味も持たないように見えた瞬間こそが、後になって人生の輝きとして思い返されるのだという。
No one, she says, leaves the world muttering "I wish I had worked more." An evening walk along the shore with one's wife, the boxed lunch at a child's sports day, the idle chat with the master of a coffee shop they had visited for decades — it is those moments, the ones that seemed at the time to mean nothing, that come back later as the true brilliance of a life.
結局のところ、生きがいとは何かと問われれば、答えは人の数だけあるとしか言いようがない。畑の土であれ、絵筆であれ、孫の笑顔であれ、それを失ったら自分でなくなってしまうと感じる何か。それこそが、その人にとっての生きがいなのだろう。
Ask, in the end, what ikigai is, and one can only answer that there are as many answers as there are people. Whether it is the soil of a field, a paintbrush, or the smile of a grandchild, it is whatever, if lost, would make you cease to be yourself. That, for each person, is their ikigai.
慌ただしく流れていく日々の中で、自分にとっての「甲斐」とは何か、ときに立ち止まって考えてみるのも悪くないのではないだろうか。
In the middle of days that rush past us, it might not be such a bad thing to stop, once in a while, and ask what our own "worth-living" really is.