The stress doesn't stop there. The country's notorious work culture ensures most people put in long hours at the office, governed by strict hierarchical rules. Overwork is not uncommon and the last trains home on weekdays around midnight are filled with people in suits. How do they manage?

For Japanese however, the idea is slightly different. One's ikigai may have nothing to do with income. In fact, in a<a href="http://www.crs.or.jp/backno/No636/6362.htm">survey </a>of 2,000 Japanese men and women conducted by Central Research Services in 2010, just 31% of recipients considered work as their ikigai. Someone's value in life can be work - but is certainly not limited to that.

Hasegawa points out that in English, the word life means both lifetime and everyday life. So, ikigai translated as life's purpose sounds very grand. "But in Japan we have jinsei, which means lifetime and seikatsu, which means everyday life," he says. The concept of ikigai aligns more to seikatsu and, through his research, Hasegawa discovered that Japanese people believe that the sum of small joys in everyday life results in more fulfilling life as a whole.

For Japanese workers in big cities, a typical work day begins with a state called sushi-zum e, a term which likens commuters squeezed into a crowded train car to tightly packed grains of rice in sushi. The stress doesn't stop there.

Ikigai: A Japanese concept to improve work and life

Krishna Thakur