What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds

by Gordon Mathews

Book Overview

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,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520201337
• ISBN13: 9780520201330
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

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.