What Japan’s longevity hotspots taught me about individuality, vitality and relevance of being iki-iki. My article, “The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered Down?,” sparked far more discussion than I expected. Some readers agreed wholeheartedly that individuality is alive and well in Japan. Others insisted the famous proverb still perfectly describes life here, particularly in the corporate world. Some shared deeply personal stories of feeling like a nail hammered down. One en

I've wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. The irony is that my relationship with language did not begin well. I didn't speak a recognizable word until I was three years old. Doctors were concerned. My family tells me my first word was "Pop," spoken on the day my older sister started school. Until then, the only sound I uttered was a single syllable: "ish." She did the talking for me, interpreting "ish" and telling everyone what I meant. School wasn't much eas

Earlier this year, I was invited to join a plenary panel at the Asian Conference on Aging & Gerontology in Tokyo, organized by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR). Sharing the platform with Hector Garcia, co-author of Ikigai, Professor Sawano, and moderated by Professor Dexter DaSilva, I challenged one of the most familiar assumptions about Japan—an assumption that has found its way into countless books, business seminars, and conversations about Japanese culture. "The n

What if Japan's super-agers are the "Last Cohort"? A question I am asked, and to be frank, one I have pondered myself, goes something like this: "Lowell, you refer to the Art of Community in Japan. But what about hikikomori and kodokushi? If Japan is getting community right, how do you explain those?" It is a fair question. For readers unfamiliar with the terms, hikikomori refers to people who withdraw from society, sometimes remaining isolated in their homes for months or ev

Father's Day has a way of bringing old thoughts back to the surface. Over the past few weeks, I have found myself in several conversations with fathers. Some were casual discussions between men comparing notes. Others were more intentional conversations with younger fathers seeking advice and coaching. Different backgrounds. Different circumstances. Yet beneath each conversation lies the same question. How do I help my son become a man? Over the years, I have written about fa

One of the privileges of spending the past two years traveling across Japan researching longevity has been meeting people who defy the statistics. Not people who deny aging. Not people who have somehow escaped it. But people who continue to be ambitious, curious, engaged, and active well into the years when many assume life inevitably narrows. For most, death is not what we fear. What unsettles is the long, slow decline that leads to it. The period between healthy life expe

Why the words we use may determine whether we achieve our goals At the Never Too Late Academy, we often talk about audacious goals. Crossing oceans. Writing a book at seventy. Changing careers at sixty-five. Getting healthy after years of neglect. Starting over after loss, illness, failure. Learning new skills. Moving to a new culture. Running a marathon. Starting a new business Big goals. But here is the reality: audacious goals are not achieved through inspiration alone. T

I do not like retirement homes. There, I said it. I understand why they exist. I understand the economics, the healthcare efficiencies, and the reassurance they give children and grandchildren who worry about aging parents living alone. But after spending the last two years traveling through Japan’s longevity hotspots researching healthy lifespan, community, and aging, I am uneasy with the idea of separating older people from the normal rhythm of society and placing them into

One of the greatest threats to healthy aging is not medical decline, but the collapse of intergenerational relevance. For the better part of the last three years, I have been traveling through Japan’s longevity hotspots, meeting people who remain active, independent, socially connected, and purposeful well into their eighties and nineties, long past Japan’s average healthy life expectancy of approximately seventy-three years. Again and again, I encounter something that is dif

Rites of Passage, Intergenerational Life, and the Communities That Endure In a small hamlet not far from where my boat Wahine is moored in remote Japan, there sits a weathered stone beside a tiny shrine overlooking the bay. It is not especially large, perhaps the size of a basketball. Salt air and countless hands have worn much of its surface smooth over the years. At first glance, it seems ordinary, another object aging alongside the village itself. For generations, however

This week in Tokyo, I had the privilege of spending time with two Haiku masters, Emiko Miyashita and Kyoko Uchimura. We shared dinner, exchanging thoughts on poetry, aging, and life in Japan. The following day I sat in on their workshop during a conference on the Humanities and the Arts organised by the International Academic Forum. Many of the older people I meet in Japan’s longevity hotspots practice haiku, and I wanted to understand more. To many outsiders, haiku can appea

Early in my research into aging in Japan, gerontologist Dr. James McNally wrote me and said something that stopped me in my tracks. He suggested that I may be documenting the last cohort of Japanese super-agers: a generation who benefited from social and cultural conditions that may no longer exist in the same form. That thought has stayed with me ever since. Recently, psychologist Professor Dexter Da Silva, after hearing me share about the “last cohort” idea, wondered aloud

Early in my research for Longevity and the Art of Community: Lessons from Japan , a leading gerontologist made a remark that has stayed with me. Professor James McNally of the University of Michigan and a colleague in the International Academic Forum suggested that I might be studying the last cohort of super-agers in Japan. At the time, the phrase struck me as dramatic. The longer I travel, the more I listen, and the more I compare what I see with the data, the more I thin

Why I Love This Family Photo I saw this photo in a social media post at 5:30 this morning. It brought a smile. The smile wasn’t just about familiar faces; it was recognition, and with it a sense of admiration, appreciation, and even inspiration. This is what it looks like when an NPO gets it right. Not all do. If you are interested, here`s why: I’ve spent a lifetime in community development and charity work, and over the years, one conviction has only grown stronger: you r

Longevity is not just adding years to life, but firsts to years. Perhaps it was the contrast that made the question unavoidable. I had spent a week in Tokyo immersed in research on aging, and then leaving Tokyo on the Shinkansen, whizzing past Japan's largest mountain, Mt Fuji, where, I hoped to snatch a photo, but just at the moment when Japan`s iconic peak came into view, my phone pinged with a photo of my six-month-old grandson tasting corn for the first time. The pic my

As writing becomes effortless with AI, it is worth asking what happens to the process that gives it meaning. That question sharpened when I learned that Amazon had recently limited authors to 3 uploads per day. Yep, that’s right. Three books a day! That decision alone tells you the scale of what is happening. At the same time, AI tools can now generate articles, blogs, and even books instantly from a simple prompt. The result is a flood of AI-generated material. I deliberat

(after travelling it slowly, repeatedly, and from the margins) The longer I spend in Japan, and the more slow and solo travel I do, the more I realise how much I need to unlearn: the assumptions you carry before you arrive, and the ones that linger long after. Forty-seven prefectures. Thirty-nine by bicycle. Twenty by sailboat. Many repeat visits and months of immersion. Two years spent seeking out longevity hot spots. Unlearning, I’ve discovered, is often the precursor to di

Lessons in interdependence from Japan’s longevity communities and a boat in Buren Bay. This week I watched something unexpectedly instructive. After some time moored in the middle of the bay, I moved my boat to a small fishing port and tied her against the wall. On the way in, she felt slower than usual. From the dock, I could look down and see why: a thin layer of marine growth had formed along the hull. Not dramatic. Just enough to create drag. Then a school of fish appeare

A rabbit hole I fell into after finishing a book on longevity in Japan I’ve just finished writing a book on longevity lessons from Japan, and the manuscript is now in my agent’s hands. For various reasons, I can’t share much from the book itself at the moment. But since submission, I found myself down a rabbit hole. Before writing it, I spent fifteen months moored in Okinawa, long celebrated as one of the world’s most famous “Blue Zones.” While there, I made an uncomfortable

Men and Women and the Shape of Decline in the RED ZONE For the past year, I have been researching and writing a book about longevity hot spots in Japan. The project was triggered after spending 15 months moored in Okinawa from late 2023, immersed in what has long been described as the world’s most famous Blue Zone . It was there that I ran into an uncomfortable truth. Statistically, Okinawa has lost ground in the longevity tables compared to the rest of Japan. That meant