The Diagram That Is Not Japanese

Answer to the question

Is the four-circle ikigai diagram actually Japanese?

No. The four circles are Andres Zuzunaga's Spanish purpose diagram, dated either 2011 or 2012 depending on the account, and Marc Winn added the Japanese word at the centre on his personal blog on 14 May 2014. He has described doing exactly that in three published accounts, and calls the result a Western adaptation.

Key takeaways

• The four circles are Andres Zuzunaga's Spanish purpose diagram, and Marc Winn added the Japanese word at the centre on his own blog on 14 May 2014, as he has described in three published accounts.
• Its date is unresolved: Winn's 2025 account says 2011, while a comment signed Zuzunaga on the 2014 post says 2012 and points at a book of 2013.
• The longevity promise sits in the founding post itself, immediately below the image, sourced to Dan Buettner's TED talk on the Blue Zones.
• The Japanese cohorts measured one self-report question with two or three options, never asking what a respondent's reason for living was or whether it paid.
• No study could be found that tests whether satisfying all four circles predicts any outcome, and no instrument operationalises them.

You have seen the diagram. Four circles, overlapping, with a Japanese word printed in the middle, on an HR slide or a careers-service handout or a poster in a coach's office. The word is ikigai, and the promise attached to the picture is that where the four circles meet you will find the thing you were put here to do, and live longer for having found it. The picture is not Japanese. The man who made it says so himself.

Who drew the four circles first?

The shape began as a Spanish diagram about purpose. Its author is Andres Zuzunaga, described by the man who relabelled it as a Spanish astrologer, with a site at cosmograma.com, and the word at the centre of his version was the Spanish for purpose. That attribution rests on two things: the accounts of the man who relabelled it, and a comment signed Zuzunaga in the thread of his blog. Zuzunaga's own publication of the diagram we could not read, in any form or at any date, and neither of the two books through which the shape is said to have travelled.

Even the date is contested. Marc Winn, who added the Japanese word two years or three years later, calls it "His 2011 framework" in his 2025 account. The comment, dated 29 April 2017, says the graphic was made in 2012 and was published and well quoted in a book the following year, which we also did not reach. The conflict is reported and left standing.

The four elements, as Winn lists them, are "what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for". Nothing in that list is Japanese. It is a career-planning shape with a career-planning label, and the route to Winn runs through a book we have not read, David Carter's Breakthrough. That path is the one Winn describes, and it is as far as the chain goes.

What did the 2014 post actually claim?

On Wednesday 14 May 2014, Winn published a short post on his personal blog under the title "What is your Ikigai?", a date still carried in the page metadata. He had met the Japanese word in Dan Buettner's TED talk on the Blue Zones, and his post attributes to the Japanese the gloss that an ikigai is essentially a reason to get up in the morning. He put that word in the middle of Zuzunaga's circles and published the result.

What follows the image is the part almost nobody who shares the picture has read. "Your ikigai lies at the centre of those interconnecting circles," Winn writes. "If you are lacking in one area, you are missing out on your life's potential." The next sentence adds that lacking one circle means "you are missing out on your chance to live a long and happy life".

His source is in the next paragraph. He describes a long-standing interest in outliers, and in communities that live far longer than average, points his readers at Buettner's talk, and writes that one of the most significant factors is ikigai. The longevity promise, then, was never bolted on afterwards by a self-help market. It was printed in the founding text, next to the picture, by a man writing up a talk he admired.

What has Winn said since?

A great deal, and all of it against the picture's authority. The comment signed Zuzunaga appeared in April 2017. A note Winn has added at the foot of the original post reads, in part, "What I did was add a single word to a shape that already existed", and then: "Andres pointed this out in the comments here some years ago and he was right to. The diagram is his." In February 2025 he published a longer account, in which the visual structure belongs to Zuzunaga and his own part was adding the word, and he has "since clarified that it's a Western adaptation, not an authentic representation of Japanese philosophy". His pillar page is blunter:

> "I didn't invent the diagram. I didn't invent ikigai. I just put them in the same picture, on a small personal blog, on a Wednesday morning."

He carries the same attribution on his commercial site. On how far the image went, he lists TED slides, HR presentations and coaches' offices, and says he has no reliable measure of its total reach. Neither have we, and neither has anyone who sells the picture.

What the diagram has never acquired, in eleven years on those walls, is a test. We searched for a study asking whether satisfying all four circles predicts any outcome, for an instrument that operationalises the four, and for a trial of the four-circle exercise. We found none. A thorough search of the coaching and career-development literatures was not done, and nothing outside English was searched, so the claim here is that no test could be found. Claims do travel this way, as [the provenance of the flow literature](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-the-flow-studies-measured) shows.

What does the Japanese word name?

Something smaller, older and much easier to measure. The best available route to the word's ordinary sense, for anyone who does not read Japanese, runs through an epidemiology paper. Introducing their 2008 mortality study, Sone and colleagues quote the most authoritative dictionary in Japan, which glosses the sense as joy and a feeling of well-being from being alive, and then give the word in use:

> "The term ikigai is commonly used in such phrases as 'this hobby is what makes my life worth living (ikigai)' or 'raising children makes my life worth living (ikigai)'."

A hobby. Raising children.

The dictionary examples of the word are a hobby and raising children, printed in an epidemiology journal six years before the diagram existed.

That passage was printed six years before the diagram existed, and the dictionary it quotes, which reaches us only through Sone and colleagues quoting it, dates from 1987. The research literature also keeps a distinction the four circles collapse. Randall and colleagues, in a 2023 mixed-methods study of Japanese older adults, use the term ikigai-kan for the felt sense that a life is worth living, as against whatever particular thing supplies it, and observe that the sense can be raised without changing the contents of a life at all.

English-language work commonly traces that two-part structure to Mieko Kamiya's book of 1966, which is in Japanese, has no English edition and is unread here, so it is reported as an attribution and nothing more. Kotera and colleagues, reviewing the health literature in 2021, describe the concept as originally identified in difficult life experiences among leprosy patients. The sources that Randall's participants name are domestic and small: a day service, lunch with friends, a shopping trip. Not one of them is a paid role in which four conditions intersect, and Western restatements drift, as [the popular Buddhist claim about suffering](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/suffering-thinking-mind) did.

What did the Japanese cohorts measure?

Two very large ones measured a single question. Between 1988 and 1990 the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study asked 30,155 men and 43,117 women aged 40 to 79 a question about ikigai inside a lifestyle questionnaire; the exact wording sits in a paywalled methods section we could not read. In late 1994 the Ohsaki study put a 93-item questionnaire to every national health insurance beneficiary aged 40 to 79 across fourteen municipalities of Miyagi Prefecture, and 94.6 per cent answered. After exclusions the analytic sample was 43,391 adults. The item read:

> "Do you have ikigai in your life?"

Three answers were offered: yes, uncertain, or no. Fifty-nine per cent chose yes, 4.6 per cent chose no, and 36.4 per cent chose uncertain. Nobody was asked what their reason for living was, whether it paid, or whether the world needed it. One question, three options, asked once in 1994.

The construct carrying a hazard ratio of 1.5 across 43,391 people is a single self-report item asked once in 1994.

Over seven years and 269,989 person-years, 3,048 of those adults died. With adjustment for age, sex, marital status, education, job, self-rated health, perceived mental stress, bodily pain, physical function, body mass index, smoking, alcohol, walking time, sleep and seven disease histories, those answering no carried a hazard ratio for all-cause mortality of 1.5, with a confidence interval from 1.3 to 1.7. Stroke was 2.1, from 1.6 to 2.9. Cardiovascular disease was 1.6 and pneumonia 1.8. Cancer did not reach significance, at 1.3 from 1.0 to 1.6, and neither did ischaemic heart disease or suicide.

The figures look very different before adjustment. With age and sex alone, all-cause mortality was 2.5, cardiovascular disease 3.0 and stroke 3.6. The confounders do most of the work: the people answering no were markedly more likely to be unmarried, unemployed, less educated, in pain, in poor self-rated health and under heavy stress. The paper also states that no reasons have been reported for the excess cardiovascular mortality, so mechanism is unestablished, and every figure is observational with the exposure recorded as one self-reported answer.

The larger cohort found the same shape from the other side. Followed for a mean of 12.5 years, with 10,021 deaths, and with the headline results restricted to the period after the first five years as a guard against reverse causation, men reporting ikigai had a hazard ratio for all-cause mortality of 0.85, from 0.80 to 0.90. For women it was 0.93, with the interval reaching 1.00.

Where does the real construct run out?

In several places at once, and the most careful study is where the mortality finding stops. Okuzono and colleagues took the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study, asked adults aged 65 and over a binary version of the question in 2013, measured outcomes in 2016, and adjusted for the participants' own values on those outcomes three years before baseline. All-cause mortality came out at 0.85, with an interval from 0.60 to 1.19, which includes no effect at all.

Their point estimate almost matches the earlier cohorts, and their interval is wider because 6 per cent of the sample died inside three years, which leaves a null too imprecise to contradict anything. Their first stated limitation is the measure: a single binary item, prone to misclassification, since 36.4 per cent of the Ohsaki sample had chosen uncertain. They could assess neither levels of the construct nor its sources, and they ask for future work on the kinds of activity people draw it from, which is exactly what the diagram pretends to supply. [Scope conditions bind a finding](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-anticipation-actually-adds) here as anywhere.

The same table shows the construct's edges. Functional disability came out at 0.69 and dementia at 0.64, with hopelessness at 0.43 the largest effect of all. But frequency of volunteering did not move, and that is where the world-needs circle would sit. Benefit concentrated in men and in people of higher socioeconomic status, which the authors flag and cannot explain. Lower depressive symptoms before baseline predicted having the sense later, so for the psychological outcomes the arrow runs in both directions. Outside Japan the evidence base is ninety-four people in a single online survey.

Then Okinawa, which is where the longevity promise came from, and where nobody measured it. The word appears nowhere in the Blue Zones demographers' own account of their work, whose seventeen references concern diet, telomere length, ancestry, climate and cohort shift, and the Okinawa Centenarian Study's researchers attribute the longevity mainly to diet, way of life and genetics. We searched for an empirical test of ikigai against Okinawan longevity and found none. The Blue Zone age records are themselves under live challenge, in a demographic dispute we are not qualified to settle, and the ikigai part of the story was never evidenced whichever way that falls.

One trade book goes further than the market around it. David Marlow's The Ikigai Way, published by Wiley in 2025, declines to print the diagram and argues against it in six separate chapters, calling it "the T-ball version" of the concept and "the equivalent of a participation trophy". He drops the payment requirement outright, writing that your art is your art whether it makes money or not, and never adopts the world-serving requirement. He cites no Japanese source anywhere, and the question of where the picture came from gets three words, "Regardless of the origin".

So the fix has a price, and this is where the inversion bites. Strip the four circles away and what remains is a construct the research can actually carry: a modest question about whether there is a reason to get up, which predicted mortality across two very large cohorts with the confounders doing most of the work, a null in the best-guarded study, benefits concentrated in men and the better-off, and no known mechanism. The measured version is real, but it answers nothing about which job to take on Monday, and that answer is the whole of what the picture was ever loved for.

Common questions

Is the four-circle ikigai diagram actually Japanese?

No. The visual is Andres Zuzunaga's Spanish purpose diagram, dated either 2011 or 2012 depending on the account, and Marc Winn added the Japanese word at its centre on his own blog on 14 May 2014. Winn has described what he did in three published accounts, and says the result is not an authentic representation of Japanese philosophy.

What does the Japanese word ikigai actually mean?

In Japanese usage it names joy and a feeling of well-being from being alive. The most authoritative dictionary in Japan, as quoted by Sone and colleagues, glosses it that way, and the examples they give are a hobby and raising children. Nothing in the ordinary sense requires a career, an income or four conditions met at once.

What did the Japanese mortality studies actually ask?

One question. The Ohsaki study asked 43,391 adults "Do you have ikigai in your life?", offering yes, uncertain or no; a later nationwide study used a binary version of the same question. Nobody was asked what their answer consisted of, whether it paid, or whether the world needed it, so the four circles were never among the things measured.

Does having ikigai make people live longer?

The evidence is observational and cannot establish that. In the Ohsaki cohort, answering no carried a hazard ratio for all-cause mortality of 1.5 after heavy adjustment, against 2.5 with age and sex alone. A larger cohort found 0.85 for men. The best-guarded study found no mortality effect, on an interval too wide to contradict the earlier cohorts. Mechanism is unestablished.

Sources

Winn, M. (2014). 'What is your Ikigai?' theviewinside.me, 14 May 2014. https://theviewinside.me/what-is-your-ikigai

Winn, M. (2025). 'The Story Behind the Ikigai Venn Diagram: A Personal Journey.' theviewinside.me, 15 February 2025. https://theviewinside.me/the-story-behind-the-ikigai-venn-diagram-a-personal-journey

Winn, M. 'Ikigai: the story behind the diagram.' theviewinside.me/ikigai. https://theviewinside.me/ikigai

Sone, T., Nakaya, N., Ohmori, K., Shimazu, T., Higashiguchi, M., Kakizaki, M., Kikuchi, N., Kuriyama, S., & Tsuji, I. (2008). 'Sense of Life Worth Living (Ikigai) and Mortality in Japan: Ohsaki Study.' Psychosomatic Medicine, 70(6), 709-715. doi:10.1097/PSY.0b013e31817e7e64

Tanno, K., Sakata, K., Ohsawa, M., Onoda, T., Itai, K., Yaegashi, Y., & Tamakoshi, A. (2009). 'Associations of ikigai as a positive psychological factor with all-cause mortality and cause-specific mortality among middle-aged and elderly Japanese people: findings from the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study.' Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 67(1), 67-75. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychores.2008.10.018

Okuzono, S. S., and colleagues (2022). 'Ikigai and subsequent health and wellbeing among Japanese older adults: Longitudinal outcome-wide analysis.' The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific, 21, 100391. doi:10.1016/j.lanwpc.2022.100391

Randall, N., and colleagues (2023). 'Understanding the Connection Among Ikigai, Well-Being, and Home Robot Acceptance in Japanese Older Adults: Mixed Methods Study.' JMIR Aging, 6, e45442. doi:10.2196/45442

Kotera, Y., Kaluzeviciute, G., Garip, G., McEwan, K., & Chamberlain, K. (2021). 'Health Benefits of Ikigai: A Review of Literature.' In Y. Kotera & D. Fido (Eds.), Ikigai: Towards a psychological understanding of a life worth living. Concurrent Disorders Society Publishing

Wilkes, J., Garip, G., Kotera, Y., & Fido, D. (2022). 'Can Ikigai Predict Anxiety, Depression, and Well-being?' International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 21, 2941-2953. doi:10.1007/s11469-022-00764-7

Fido, D., Kotera, Y., & Asano, K. (2019). 'English Translation and Validation of the Ikigai-9 in a UK Sample.' International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 18(5), 1352-1359. doi:10.1007/s11469-019-00150-w

Tee, E. Y. J., Tsukamoto, S., & Steger, M. F. (2026). 'Between Science and Self-Help: A Scoping Review of Scholarly and Popular Definitions of Ikigai.' Journal of Happiness Studies, 27(6). doi:10.1007/s10902-026-01080-w

Newman, S. J. (2024). 'Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud.' bioRxiv, version 3, 14 March 2024. doi:10.1101/704080

Pes, G., Rosero-Bixby, L., Chrysohoou, C., Stefanadis, C., Willcox, B. J., & Willcox, C. (2024). Open letter, 'To Whom It May Concern', October 2024. https://www.bluezones.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Demographers-Statement-10.2024.pdf

Marlow, D. E. (2025). The Ikigai Way: A Simple Path for Living a Life of Purpose. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons

Related concepts

• Ikigai
• Provenance Of A Cultural Attribution
• Construct Validity
• Single-Item Measures

People

• David E. Marlow
• Andres Zuzunaga