Tsundoku & Co.: Weird Japanese Words You’ll Want to Use

I’ve been learning Japanese for… well, long enough that I’ve stopped counting. Let’s say “more than a decade” to sound impressive, and “speaking like a five-year-old” to stay honest. Over the years I’ve collected a handful of Japanese words that helped me look at certain problems from a different angle.

Some sneaked into my vocabulary during gaming courses, others during late-night existential crises, and a few simply because they describe my habits a little too accurately.

Business Words We Stole Because They Were Too Useful

I became friends with kanban during my Game Production course. In Japanese it simply means “signboard”, the kind you’d see hanging over a shop entrance. Kanban started as a way for Toyota workers to whisper politely to the factory, “Hey, we need more parts,” without anyone yelling across the assembly line. Think of kanban as a fancy, organized to-do list you can see at a glance, where moving a card from one column to another somehow makes you feel productive—even if the tasks themselves never get smaller. My first kanban board felt like a revelation: everything colour-coded, tidy, and sorted into categories that implied I had a grip on my life. For approximately 2.5 days, I was a productivity samurai. And then I realized the backlog column had grown into a small universe with its own gravitational field—basically a visual representation of my personality.

Productivity samurai. With Tsundoku piles.

Later, I crossed paths with kaizen—literally “change for better”, the philosophy of continuous improvement that somehow ended up on every corporate mug. It’s the idea that small, steady upgrades matter more than dramatic overhauls. Kaizen is like life’s tiny patch updates. Not a dramatic expansion pack that makes you perfect overnight—just small tweaks you do every day: adjust your workflow, fix a habit, level up your coffee game. Do a little better than yesterday, rinse, repeat, and suddenly you’ve improved without even noticing. It’s slow progress, but it actually sticks.

Words for People Who Search for Meaning on a Tuesday at 2 AM

But the words that truly stuck with me aren’t about productivity—they’re about trying to figure out why we exist, preferably before breakfast. I’ve spent years looking for meaning, purpose, direction… occasionally even jobs. So when I first heard ikigai, often described as “what makes life worth living”, I thought: perfect, that’s exactly what I need. Except the famous Venn diagram version—what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, what someone will pay for—keeps personally attacking me. Especially that last circle. Payment is my weakest link; the universe still refuses to fund my hobbies. A related term, kokorozashi, digs even deeper. It’s not just a goal. It’s an aspiration tied to your values, your inner direction, the why behind your ambitions. If ikigai is the thing that keeps you getting out of bed, kokorozashi is the compass you follow once you’re finally up. They’re both deeply human attempts to map the intangible, which is comforting when your own map feels like it was drawn by a confused raccoon.

Then we arrive at the aesthetic-philosophical duo often assumed to be opposites but actually fit together like puzzle pieces: wabi-sabi and kodawari.

Wabi-sabi is the appreciation of imperfection, impermanence, and the quiet beauty of things that aren’t polished to death. Kodawari is the exact opposite energy—or so it seems: intense dedication to detail, caring so much about quality that you’ll adjust something no one else would ever notice.

But here’s the twist: they coexist. They need each other. Kodawari is the intention, the effort, the devotion. Wabi-sabi is the acceptance that the result will always carry traces of humanity. One gives form. The other gives soul. And honestly, I cling to this philosophy whenever my own projects turn out more “delightfully imperfect” than “Pinterest-ready.”

And Then There’s My Favorite: Tsundoku

My favourite term, though, is the deeply relatable tsundoku. Literally “pile up + read”, meaning the act of acquiring books and then… not reading them. Just owning them. Displaying them. Letting them judge you silently from the shelf. My tsundoku stacks are architectural features at this point. They whisper, “One day…” and I whisper back, “Sure.”

So here I am: searching for my ikigai, building new tsundoku piles of educational and self‑help books, prepping kanban backlogs of what I should read next—and hardly pushing anything into the “Done” column. And honestly? That’s a little bit wabi-sabi. A little imperfect, a little chaotic, very human.

Do you also have some favorite Japanese words? I’d love to hear them.

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