The Secret To A Long Life May Lie In These Japanese Principles

The secret to living longer, better lives as told by the age-old guiding principles of the Japanese.

- Kames Narayanan

The Japanese live longer than most, statistically speaking. For almost three decades, the land of the rising sun has topped the World Health Organization’s list of average life expectancy. In 2017, the country also reported a staggering population of more than two million who had crossed the 90-year-old age mark. It then comes as little surprise that Kane Tanaka, who was minted the oldest living person by Guinness World Records, hails from Japan.

Discounting anomalies, the length of one’s life is intrinsically linked to the way of life. If the numbers are anything to go by, the Japanese have long decoded, or rather invented, the elusive formula for longevity.

There are specific principles that ground the distinctively Japanese approach to life. By now, the rest of the world has at least had a brief introduction, courtesy of Marie Kondo — the petite, mild-mannered Japanese lady who has pervaded households across the globe with a methodical approach to tidying up learnt from her culture.

“Each time I return home, I greet the house. This is my way of expressing thanks for the shelter and comfort it provides me,” she writes on her Facebook page. To the uninitiated, Kondo’s practice of giving gratitude to inanimate objects as it plays out on her Netflix series is puzzling, bizarre behaviour. Where Kondo is from, the belief that kami — or the divine — inhibits all forms of life (and therefore, all things, living or otherwise should be respected) is adopted by a significant proportion of the country’s inhabitants. Although rooted in the traditional Japanese religion of Shinto, when stripped away of its religious context, the ideology still holds ground as a general approach to life.