- The author of ikigai traveled to Ogimi Village in Okinawa - known as a "longevity village" - and interviewed 100 elders about the secret to long life. Many described ikigai as "a reason to get up in the morning - something you want to do."

They also emphasized approaching even small tasks with passion. Garcia concluded that when people engage in something that gives them ikigai, they enter a "flow state," fully absorbed and performing at their best - much like the artisans admired by Steve Jobs.
The authors describe ikigai as an activity that includes four overlapping elements:

1. What you love
2. What the world needs
3. What you are good at
4. What you can be paid for

When these four align, people experience fulfillment, which ultimately leads to self-realization.

Around the time their book gained global traction, neuroscientist Kenichiro Mogi was asked by a London publisher to write about ikigai from a Japanese perspective. His book, The Little Book of Ikigai, published in 2017, also became a major international success, with translations in 57 countries and top rankings in Germany's nonfiction category.

Mogi has become known as "the guru of IKIGAI." He explains that modern science increasingly studies how humans achieve happiness and well-being, and the global spotlight has turned to Japan - a nation known for longevity - where the concept of ikigai is deeply valued.

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Chijimi Shikoh - the shrink orientation:

"The Japanese Mind: A Study of Chijimi Shikoh" is a well-known work by Korean scholar Lee O-Young, who explores a distinctive cultural tendency he calls chijimi shikoh - the shrink-orientation or miniaturizing impulse found throughout Japanese aesthetics, craftsmanship, and everyday life.
He argues that Japanese culture often seeks refinement through reduction: making things smaller, more compact, more precise, and more intricate. From bonsai and haiku to compact technology and meticulous packaging, Lee suggests that Japan’s creativity frequently emerges not from expansion but from compression, condensation, and subtlety.

In Noguchi Taiso training and the related Butoh exercises, you can find the ways for cultivating subtle movements and the sensitivity to perceive them such as the heaviness of the cheeks, the natural weight of the wrist, the feeling of weight in the jawbone, and so on.
“In Japan’s tradition of eight million gods lies the notion that the divine is found in every place.”

We have accepted participants from abroad who were interested in Ikigai related these exercises together with gross and strong movements as sometimes seen in the aggressive Butoh performance. (Itto Morita)

• The first Japanese philosopher in the Meiji era:
  Kitaro Nishida's idea of "the self-identity of absolute contradictions" describes a reality in which opposing elements do not cancel each other out but coexist as a unified whole. In this view, contradiction is not a problem to be solved but the very dynamic structure of reality and self-awareness.
  The self becomes a place where opposites -
  
  "being and nothingness, subject and object, body and mind, beauty and ugliness, love and hatred, and etc." - interpenetrate and form a deeper unity.
  * And, how do we give form to the struggles within Butoh ?



• An idea in Koryu Bujutsu (old-school martial arts):
  "To handle contradiction as contradiction, without trying to resolve or eliminate it".
  This seems to be a physical and practical way to understand Nishida's concept, and our butoh-related exercises contain this element.