How to find your ‘ikigai’: Juliet Kinsman on a new way to travel with a conscience — July 2018, The Week
Ikigai – pronounced ‘ee-key-guy’ – is the Japanese term for finding your purpose; your raison d’etre, to borrow from the French. As a word lover, I’m a sucker for those on-point foreign expressions for which we have no English equivalent. Japanese is awash with untranslatables – komorebi being the sunshine that filters cinematically through leaves, and kuidaore denoting that you’ve eaten your way into bankruptcy. The travel industry can never resist a new buzzword, but knowing that iki means ‘life’ and gai translates as ‘value’ gives ikigai more gravitas than trend-words such as ‘mancation’ and ‘flashpacking’.