Remarkable

books:


	• What Makes Life Worth Living?: How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds Gordon Mathews University of California Press, 1996 - 296 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Remarkable

i read this book as a part of a university assignment - a thorough and thoughtful account of how people view their lives, of what is held as the most important aspect in life to make it worth living. Mathews introduces his cross cultural theory of IKIGAI (The thing that makes life worth living) and works through active and real demonstrations of evidence to illustrate this theory. The main body of the book is made up of Personal accounts from interviews with a wide range of Japanese and American individuals, and a relevant analysis of these accounts as each is compared one to the other. Not only is it a remarkable insight into the cultural differences in emphasis of what life is about, it is also an eye opener to the reader - what is it that I find most important in life? What makes MY life worth living? What is my ikigai? A truly wonderful, thought provoking piece of work. I was utterly absorbed from the moment i opened the first page.

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Here is an original and provocative anthropological approach to the fundamental philosophical question of what makes life worth living. Gordon Mathews considers this perennial issue by examining nine pairs of similarly situated individuals in the United States and Japan. In the course of exploring how people from these two cultures find meaning in their daily lives, he illuminates a vast and intriguing range of ideas about work and love, religion, creativity, and self-realization.
Mathews explores these topics by means of the Japanese term ikigai, "that which most makes one's life seem worth living." American English has no equivalent, but ikigai applies not only to Japanese lives but to American lives as well. Ikigai is what, day after day and year after year, each of us most essentially lives for.
Through the life stories of those he interviews, Mathews analyzes the ways Japanese and American lives have been affected by social roles and cultural vocabularies. As we approach the end of the century, the author's investigation into how the inhabitants of the world's two largest economic superpowers make sense of their lives brings a vital new understanding to our skeptical age.

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