Helsinki Bookstores Are Stacked With Books On How To Live Like The Japanese

What's going on

Someone photographed a display table at Akateeminen Kirjakauppa, the largest bookstore in central Helsinki. Piled on it were books promising to teach Finnish readers how to live like the Japanese — ikigai, omoiyari, Zen calm, the art of not worrying. Not one or two titles tucked into a corner, but a whole genre with its own table.

The reason this photo hits a nerve in Japan is that Japanese bookstores have been running the exact same operation in reverse for about two decades. Nordic countries, and Finland in particular, occupy the enlightened-elsewhere slot on Japanese shelves: hygge, lagom, saunas, short working hours, beautiful chairs, the top spots in every world happiness ranking. If you want a book on how to relax like a Finn, Japan has you covered.

So the photograph works as a mirror, and the thread that formed around it is mostly people recognizing the shape of the thing. There is a Japanese phrase for it — the neighbor's lawn is blue, meaning green and lush — and a fair number of commenters reached for it independently.

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🇫🇮 Stacks and stacks of learn-to-live-like-the-Japanese books at the Academic Bookstore in Helsinki (the biggest bookshop in Finland, in a building designed by Alvar Aalto)

🇫🇮ヘルシンキのアカデミア書店で山積みの、日本の生き方に学ぼう系書籍たち

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I’ve always thought Japan finds way too much happiness in anything Nordic, but abroad there are books called things like Learn IKIGAI From The Japanese (ikigai is roughly the thing that makes your life feel worth getting up for) and The Japanese Happiness Method selling all over the place. So it goes both ways, I guess. No such utopia exists anywhere.

日本は何でもかんでも北欧にやたら幸せ見出しすぎと思うんだが、海外では「日本人に学ぶIKIGAI」とか「日本人の幸せメソッド」みたいな本があちこちで売られているため、お互い様というか、そんな理想郷はないということだな。

There has never been a purer demonstration of the grass being greener than this.

こんなにも隣の芝は青いを体現する出来事ないだろ

lol it’s the Japan edition of those books where French people teach you how to live

フランス人が生き方を教えてくれる的な日本Verワロタ

So the French-people-don’t-own-many-clothes genre exists everywhere lol (a book titled The French Only Own Ten Pieces Of Clothing was a monster bestseller in Japan.)

フランス人は服を持たない系の本って世界中にあるんだw

Funny that Japan longs for the Nordics while the Nordics long for Japan. Two unrequited crushes passing each other in the hallway.

日本が北欧に憧れる一方で北欧も日本に憧れているのは面白いな。すれ違った片思いが交錯している

When I first heard about Finland’s sisu (a national ideal of stubborn grit — keeping at it long after it stopped being reasonable) I thought there was something quite Japanese about it, so I can see why these books sell.

フィンランドのSISU思想を聞いたとき日本にも似てるところあるなーと思ったからこういう本が人気なのも分かる

What part of Japanese people do Nordic people want to learn from, exactly.

北欧人はどの辺を日本人に学びたいんですかね。

People really do see paradise in whatever country they don’t know anything about.

人は自分の知らない国に楽園の幻想を見るんだなー

There is no ideal country anywhere. Which is exactly why people keep searching for one.

どこにも理想の国はない。だから、人々は理想を探し続ける。

Maybe Japan is the fantasy realm as far as the Nordics are concerned.

北欧にとって日本はファンタジー世界なのかもしれない。

Over the mountains, far to travel, people say, happiness dwells (the opening of a Carl Busse poem, known in Japan through a famous 1905 translation) — literally this, lol. In the internet age I guess you need a Japan-to-Helsinki sized gap before you can look happy to each other 🤔

「山のあなたの空遠く幸住むと人のいふ」そのまんまですねｗネット時代の現代では「日本⇔ヘルシンキ」くらい離れないと互いに「幸せそう」に映らないってことですかね🤔

Honestly now I want to read one.

逆に読んでみたいわな

I really want to read these.

こういうのめっちゃ読みたい

OMOIYARI lol (omoiyari is the everyday word for quietly considering how other people feel.)

OMOIYARIで草

Was wondering why Don’t Worry was sitting there in Finland, looked up Shunmyo Masuno, and — ah, he’s a Japanese monk (a Zen priest and garden designer with a large overseas readership).

なんでフィンランドで「Don't worry」なのかと思ってShunmyo masunoと検索したら、日本のお坊さんなのね。

Someone sent me one of these and I was like, huh? So this is what’s been going on.

一冊送ってもらって、え?と思ったけどそんなことになってたんだ。

Love how forceful IKIGAI looks up there.

IKIGAIの力強さ好き

The English pronunciation isn’t ee-kee-gah-ee, it’s more like ick-ee-GUY-ee.

英語発音は「イキガイ」ではなく「アィキェガイィ」です

The original writes the anglicized pronunciation out in katakana — アィキェガイィ — using small kana to jam in sounds Japanese doesn’t normally have. It reads back like a drawled, slightly mangled version of the word, which is the joke.

Bhutan, the happiness kingdom, had a KIGAI too. Maybe the feeling behind ikigai and yarigai really is distinctive (yarigai is the sense that a task is worth the effort you put into it). Whatever the reality is, I like that there’s enough humility to want to learn from other people.

幸せの国ブータン王国にも「KIGAI」ありました。「生きがい」「やりがい」という感覚は独特なのかも？現実はどうあれ、他者から学ぼうとする謙虚さがあるのが良いなと思う。

I once gave a talk (?) about doujinshi (self-published fan comics, made and sold by fans) at a high school in Estonia, and someone said oh, so this kind of activity is IKIGAI! — and that’s how I accidentally became an IKIGAI evangelist.

エストニアの高校で同人誌の紹介？したときにこういう活動がIKIGAIってやつなんですね！って言われたからうっかりIKIGAIの伝道師しちゃったことある

This word IKIGAI seems pretty famous overseas. I’ve seen images with an incomprehensible Venn diagram going THIS is what ikigai means! — feels like it’s been picked up by some shady self-help business types.

この「IKIGAI」って言葉、結構海外で有名みたいだね。意味分からんベン図みたいなので「これが生き甲斐というものだ！」とか示してる画像も見たことあるし、どうも胡散臭い自己啓発系のビジネスに利用されているっぽい

Guess every country is like this.

どこの国もこんなかんじなんだなー

This really is interesting. Now that posts get auto-translated, I’ve realized there are loads of learn-from-Japan posts in Portuguese and Arabic too.

これは面白いですね。確かに最近xでポストが自動翻訳されるようになって、日本に学ぼうポストがポルトガル語やアラビア語などでもたくさんあるということを知りました。

Think about it too long and you arrive at the dumbest possible takeaway: books are amazing, huh? You get to read a slice of the worldview and the brain of people from a country you know nothing about.

色々考えると、本ってすごいな？とかのバカの感想になる。全く知らない国の人たちの人生観や脳味噌の一部を読めちゃうんだもの。

Same energy as the names for turkey (most languages name the bird after somewhere else — turkey in English, hindi meaning India in Turkish, and Japanese calls it the seven-faced bird). Why is humanity always reaching for somewhere-that-isn’t-here?

七面鳥の名前とか、人類なんで「ここではないどこか」を求めようとするんだろな

Seeing this makes me think there are countless templates for being happy, and going looking abroad for a method just means the template you were born into doesn’t fit you — you haven’t found yours yet.

こういうの見ると、人間には幸せになる方法、型みたいなものって無数にあるんだけど、生まれた環境の型が合わないと外に幸福の方法論を求めることって、まだ自分に合う型が見つかってないだけなのかもな、と思えるな。

The feeling that life is hard is relative, and it rests heavily on comparing yourself to others. Hard for a Japanese person living in Japan to notice their own IKIGAI.

生きづらさ、というのは相対的で他者比較に寄るところが大きいんだなと思うわ。日本に住んでる日本人がIKIGAIに気づくのは難しい

Learning about other countries’ lifestyles and ways of thinking is worthwhile, but some of these books overstate things, generalize wildly, or feature customs that barely exist. Worth reading with a bit of caution.

異なる国のライフスタイルや考え方を学ぶのは有益なことには思いますが、なかには言い過ぎや極端な一般化、ほとんどない風習なども取り上げられていたりするものもありますから、読むには注意の必要なものには思います。

This. A life where you do what you want regardless of what anyone thinks is the best one.

これ他人に何思われてもやりたい事をやる人生が1番だと思う。

So the grass is greener, then. Though every way of living out there has something good in it, so picking up the useful bits as you go would probably make life easier.

隣の芝は青いということかただ世界のどこの生き方も素晴らしいところがあるのでうまく取り入れていけば楽なんだろうなと思う

My take

Conclusive proof that "the grass is always greener" is simply true.

#Relatable #Culture #Society

Source & translation note

Comments loosely translated for tone. Reactions collected from Togetter and X threads.

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