Abstract
The authors introduce our attempts to encourage people, who lost ikigai (the Japanese word for one’s sense of purpose in life: Kumano, 2005) or meaning of life, by means of the“ Ikigai-ron” expounded by Fumihiko Iida. Iida’s“ Ikigai-ron” is based on the five hypotheses concerning views on life and death, i.e., life after death hypothesis, reincarnation hypothesis, life lesson hypothesis, soul mate hypothesis, and the low of causality hypothesis. Three different professors gave subjects to the lecture on Iida’s “Ikigai-ron”, which was held 90 minutes approximately. Then the degree of ikigai and views on life and death were compared between before and after taking the lecture. Subjects were 608 students (325 males and 283 female) of three different colleges. The degree of ikigai was evaluated by means of the Purpose In Life test (PIL test) developed by Crumbaugh & Maholick (1969). We used the questionnaire in this test composed of 20 questions (Part-A). Additionally views on life and death were assessed by
the questionnaire composed of five questions. The answers to the views on life and death questions changed to the direction of believing (Wilcoxon signed rank test; p＜0.01). The mean of total points in the PIL test after taking the lecture showed larger value (males and females: 96.4±17.8) than that before taking the lecture (92.7±17.0, paired t-test; p＜0.001). It was suggested that Iida’s“ Ikigai-ron” was one of the useful methods to enhance ikigai.
