The Ikigai Journey. Francesc Miralles
out of everything and enjoying themselves as much as possible after work.
In a bar that has room for just three customers, we meet a man who has worked for over forty years for the Tokyo city council. We chat briefly (while a strange young man with two cats in a basket watches us) then he comes with us to another backstreet. After climbing several stories of a filthy building, we end up in an Okinawan restaurant, where a man is playing traditional music on a sanshin, a string instrument from the southern islands.
This ambience makes us feel nostalgic about the journey we made to Ogimi to write our previous book, Ikigai. This is where our first night in Tokyo ends.
The following day, we climb aboard the legendary bullet train.
The Village of Centenarians
In our previous book, Ikigai – The Secrets of Japan for a Long and Happy Life, we told of our adventures in Ogimi, a village with little more than three thousand inhabitants in the north of Okinawa, which is considered the place with the highest life expectancy in the world. Not only do they live a long time, but they also have one of the lowest rates of cancer in Japan, and the same is true of other diseases such as diabetes.
Many scientists have gone to Ogimi to study the locals. We went there with a camera on our shoulder and interviewed more than a hundred old people over the course of a week. We asked them about their daily routines, their diet, their family and friends, and about their secret for a health, y long life.
Of course, we also asked them what their ikigai was.
Living with them, we realized nobody was really retired. They were all busy and many of them were working several jobs.
“Ever since you stopped doing the accounting at the greengrocer’s you’ve started to lose your edge,” says Akiko to a ninety-six-year-old friend, scolding him for having relaxed after leaving his job. At the age of ninety-two, Akiko combines her role as head of the neighborhood association with the sale of handmade bags in a village shop. She is still fully active and told us: “If you don’t do anything, death comes for you.”
One of the conclusions we reached in our investigation was that the village of the centenarians’ inhabitants have found their ikigai while never ceasing to be active. Perhaps the greatest secret to longevity is to always keep busy, devoting our time to activities we love.
1st STATION
SHINKANSEN
“Bullet train” thinking
Before the train sets a course towards new horizons, let us look at the origin of the concept around which this adventure revolves. To do so, we will go back in time a quarter of a century to look at a man named Jack Welch.
Maybe you are not familiar with the name of General Electric’s chairman from 1982 to 2001, a man considered one of the best executives of the last century. Under his leadership a system was introduced to review employees’ objectives and tasks on a quarterly basis, which is still used to this day in most medium-sized and large companies.
His system worked reasonably well until he realized certain departments were starting to become less efficient.
What was going on?
The path of least resistance
On closely observing the operating processes, he realized the employees in the various departments were filling in their quarterly objectives sheet proposing incremental improvements and even trivialities. In other words, they would write down easily achievable objectives which they were sure of reaching by making as little effort as possible. What is popularly known as the path of least resistance.
Radical Change
Incremental Changes
Incremental vs Radical Omelette
An incremental change is one that adds a little improvement to something that already exists. For example, whenever it was that the first Spanish cook had the idea of adding sliced fried potatoes to the omelette, he managed to change it into a potato omelette. The omelette already existed, and the incremental improvement came from adding potatoes to it.
The radical improvement took place much earlier, when the first individual decided to break an egg, beat it and fry the result. Something that had not existed until then—the omelette—had been born. Unquestionably this was a culinary revolution.
We have all experienced it sometime; when a project’s main objectives have already been achieved, we then relax and do just enough to keep everything working. Let’s face it, we humans are lazy by nature, but if we want to better ourselves and reach new heights, we have to fight against complacency and lack of vision.
This is not restricted just to business matters. The path of least resistance also thrives in a variety of areas, such as:
• Looking after our body and personal health.
• Our relationship with our partner and/or children.
• Managing friendships and free time.
• Intellectual, artistic and even spiritual goals.
Whether out of laziness or because of the fast pace of our lives, we end up eating and sleeping in the same way, until our body gives us a serious warning, or we become stale with our partner until a crisis is provoked, and so on in all areas of our lives.
From time to time we make little adjustments and improvements, like the employees with their quarterly reviews, but they are just band-aids that fail to change the situation in any meaningful way.
It is not always a matter of laziness. Sometimes we are simply busy maintaining what we have devoted so much time to building, and we have neither the time nor the energy to take it to the next level.
Or perhaps true change scares us?
Mikawa’s secret
Jack Welch agonized over this problem, which is so typical of the human condition: how to motivate employees of the divisions that were already working quite well, so that they would take risks and keep on innovating?
He would find the answer on a trip he made to Tokyo in 1993.
On this trip he met Eiji Mikawa, the chairman of General Electric’s Japanese subsidiary and a specialist in medical technology.
Welch was impressed by the speed at which they introduced changes, outperforming the rest of General Electric’s divisions; the Japanese subsidiary had been launching the best and fastest TAC (computed tomography) machines in the world onto the market for years.
Mikawa explained to Welch the secret that inspired the book you are holding:
“If you want a train to go 10 km/h faster, you just add more horsepower to the engine. But if you need to go from 150 km/h to 300 km/h, you have to think about many other things.
Do we need to change all the tracks and make them wider? Do we have to change the suspension system?
Do we need to make the passenger cars more aerodynamic?
You have to think differently—outside the box. You won’t get a new train with a few modifications. You need to start from scratch with a whole new way of thinking.” *
A seemingly impossible assignment
To find the origin of this eye-opening concept, we have to go back to the year 1958. In the midst of the post-war economic miracle, the Japanese government issued direct orders to JR (Japan Railways) to find a quicker way to connect Tokyo with Osaka.
A few months later, the JR engineers presented a proposal for a train that would travel at an average speed of 100 km/h. This was a breakneck speed for the time and, had this first project become a reality, it would have resulted in one of the fastest trains in the