Ikigai-9 self-assessment: the only peer-reviewed ikigai test

A reader emailed me last winter with her Ikigai-9 self-assessment score. Total: 28 out of 45. She had taken the ikigai-9 test expecting a verdict and gotten a flat number that did not tell her what to do next. The number, she wrote, felt useless.

The Ikigai-9 self-assessment is the only peer-reviewed ikigai test. Nine self-report items rated 1 to 5 across three subscales: optimistic-active attitude, future-oriented attitude, and acknowledgment of meaning. Total scores run 9 to 45. Higher numbers correlate with self-reported well-being. The number is a starting reading, not a verdict.

The counter-intuitive part: the validated Ikigai-9 scale is much closer to what Kamiya Mieko was describing in 1966, daily noticing of what makes a morning worth waking into, than it is to the four-circle Venn diagram most English readers think of as "the ikigai test." Almost every English-language source treats them as the same thing. They are not.

Skip to:

• What the Ikigai-9 actually measures: three subscales, brief provenance
• The nine questions: the validated items
• How to score it: Likert 1-5, totals, subscale ranges
• What your score means: three bands and their limits
• One concrete next step per low subscale: three specific actions

What the Ikigai-9 actually measures

The Ikigai-9 measures three subscales, three items each.

Optimistic-active attitude is your sense of wanting to learn, try, and start things. Forward motion at the level of the next month.

Future-oriented attitude is your sense that the months and years ahead hold something worth showing up for.

Acknowledgment of meaning is your felt-sense of being valuable to specific people and having a role someone would miss.

The Ikigai-9 self-assessment was developed by Imai Tomoyoshi, Osada Hiroshi, and Nishimura Yoshiki at Mejiro University in Tokyo, published in 2012 in the Japanese Journal of Public Health. Fido, Kotera, and Asano translated and validated the English version with 349 UK respondents in 2020. For how the test relates to Kamiya's 1966 source text, see our main piece on the ikigai test.

The nine questions

Rate each item from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Answer for the last two to three weeks, not for an idealized average.

Optimistic-active attitude

1. I feel I would like to take on new challenges.
2. I want to take on new things.
3. I feel I would like to learn something new.

Future-oriented attitude

4. My life is mentally rich and fulfilling.
5. I think my future has hope.
6. I feel positive when I think of my future.

Acknowledgment of meaning

7. I feel valuable as a person.
8. I feel needed by other people.
9. I feel I have a role to play in society.

Write your nine numbers in a column before you read the next section. The numbers will be more honest before you know what they mean.

How to score it

The Ikigai-9 uses a five-point Likert response format. Each item is scored 1 to 5. Add your nine answers to get a total between 9 and 45.

You also get three subscale scores. Each subscale is the sum of its three items, so each subscale runs from 3 to 15.

• Items 1, 2, 3 = optimistic-active attitude subscale
• Items 4, 5, 6 = future-oriented attitude subscale
• Items 7, 8, 9 = acknowledgment of meaning subscale

The subscales matter more than the total. A 28 made up of (10, 12, 6) is a different week than a 28 made up of (9, 9, 10). The first reader has a thin acknowledgment-of-meaning week. The second reader is mildly flat across the board. The two situations call for different next steps, and the single total hides which one you are in.

What your score means

Three rough bands, with the same caveat the original authors give: this is a self-report instrument, not a diagnostic test.

36 to 45, high. You report a strong felt-sense across all three subscales. The Japanese-language scholarship suggests this band is easier to lose than to build, so the practical work is protecting the conditions that produced the score.

22 to 35, moderate. The most common band on the Ikigai-9 scale, and one subscale is usually dragging the others. Read the three subscale numbers and find the lowest one, because that is where the next step lives.

9 to 21, low. This is a real signal worth listening to. The Fido 2020 validation paper notes overlap between low Ikigai-9 scores and depressive symptomatology in the UK sample, which is the cautious way of saying that a low score can co-occur with depression and the test cannot tell you whether it does. If the felt-sense has lasted more than a few weeks, the honest move is a conversation with a trained clinician, separate from anything in this article.

The score cannot tell you whether you have a clinical condition, whether your job is the problem, or what your purpose is. Imai and colleagues built the instrument to track a self-reported felt-sense across populations. It does that one thing well.

One concrete next step per low subscale

If your lowest subscale is optimistic-active attitude (items 1, 2, 3): pick one specific thing you want to learn this month. Not a career pivot. A four-week thing, like a Japanese-language phrase a week from a Donald Keene anthology, or a pottery class on Wednesdays. The subscale measures the felt-sense of leaning toward something next, and the only way to lift it is to put something next on the calendar.

If your lowest subscale is future-oriented attitude (items 4, 5, 6): name three specific things on your calendar in the next eight weeks that you are looking forward to. Not aspirational ones. The dinner with the friend you keep rescheduling. The book you pre-ordered. The Saturday walk displaced for a month. This subscale is built from anticipated near-things, not from large life plans.

If your lowest subscale is acknowledgment of meaning (items 7, 8, 9): in the next seven days, do one small specific act of usefulness to one named person. A four-sentence email to a former colleague. A favor for a neighbor. A piece of work returned with the care it deserved. This subscale responds fastest to small specific reciprocities, which is also what Kamiya's clinical patients pointed at when their vocational ikigai had been taken away.

The reader with the score of 28 emailed me again two months later. She had not changed jobs or rewritten her life. She had picked up a calligraphy class on Tuesdays and started answering her sister's texts the same day. Her acknowledgment-of-meaning subscale had moved from 6 to 11. The number was not the thing that had changed. The Tuesday evenings were the thing that had changed, and the number had simply noticed.

— Yuki