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Kansha shite · Be grateful
The Gratitude That Doesn’t Show Up on a Happiness Scale
Japanese researchers went looking for what gratitude actually does. It barely touched life satisfaction. What it predicted instead was personal growth, closeness to others, and a sense of purpose.
Kansha shite, be grateful, is the third of the five precepts. It sits at the heart of Reiki self-practice.
The study
Nearly all gratitude research is done in the West. This one was not.
Participants in Osaka completed a battery of psychological measures, including a standard six-item gratitude questionnaire. Then, for four weeks, their phones buzzed at random times through the day asking how they felt, and once each evening asking whether it had been a good day. That produced 9,340 snapshots of ordinary life.
Crucially, the researchers separated two different ideas of wellbeing. There is life satisfaction, the Western favourite, which asks whether you are happy with how things are going. And there is psychological wellbeing, which asks something else entirely: are you growing, do you have close relationships, does your life have purpose.
- Design
- Survey plus four-week experience sampling
- Participants
- 71 adults, mean age 23.7, all in Japan
- Compared against
- Self-esteem and optimism
- Controlled for
- Personality, stress, age, income, gender
What they found
Gratitude was pointing somewhere unexpected
It predicted growth, closeness and purpose
Gratitude was linked to three dimensions of psychological wellbeing: positive relations with others, personal growth and purpose in life. The strongest of these was closeness to others.
It did not predict life satisfaction
Once personality was accounted for, gratitude added nothing to how satisfied people said they were with their lives. Self-esteem did that job instead, and did it strongly. Two earlier Japanese trials had already failed to raise life satisfaction through gratitude exercises.
Good moments counted for more
In the daily phone data, the more grateful a person was, the more a good moment translated into a good day. Self-esteem worked in the opposite direction, loosening that link. Gratitude seems to make people more responsive to the small good things, not less.
Why this is interesting for precept practice
The researchers themselves raise the possibility that the standard happiness scales may not be capturing what gratitude does for people in Japan. Their suggestion is that the measuring instrument, rather than the practice, may be the mismatch.
That is worth sitting with. Most gratitude research asks people to perform gratitude and then checks whether they feel better. Kansha shite asks for something quieter and more continuous. It is not a task with an output, and it never promised to make anyone happy. What this study found gratitude connected to instead was growth, relationship and purpose, which is a good deal closer to what the precepts are pointed at.
None of which the study set out to test. It is a correlation in a group of 71 young people in Osaka, and it should be held lightly.
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Limitations
The authors are unusually frank about these, and list most of them themselves.
- Nothing here shows cause. This is a snapshot of how things sit together, not an experiment. Grateful people had more purpose. Which produced which is unknown.
- The sample was young and narrow. Mean age 23.7, and ninety percent were students. This is not a picture of gratitude across a life.
- Seventy-one people is small for the number of relationships being tested, though a second survey of 1,024 pointed the same way.
- It ran during the pandemic. Data was collected in Japan through the winter of 2021 into 2022, which the authors flag as a possible distortion.
- Everything rests on self-report. Questionnaires and phone taps, with no physiological or observer measures to cross-check against.
- The comparison was chosen. Gratitude was tested against self-esteem and optimism specifically. Other factors might have changed the picture.
- The scales themselves are under question. The authors ask openly whether Western wellbeing measures mean the same thing in Japan, which cuts both ways.
The research
Nawa, N. E., & Yamagishi, N. (2024). Distinct associations between gratitude, self-esteem, and optimism with subjective and psychological well-being among Japanese individuals. BMC Psychology, 12, 129.
This is research into gratitude, not into Reiki, Reiki treatments or Reiki training. It is included here because gratitude is one of the five precepts.
For today only, be grateful.
Not to feel better about your life, but to be more fully in it.
