Ichiro Kishimi
Japanese philosopher and Adlerian scholar who spent three decades translating Alfred Adler's texts and building one of Japan's largest communities of Adlerian practitioners.
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Ichiro Kishimi was born in 1956 in Kyoto, Japan. He studied philosophy at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Letters, where he encountered Alfred Adler’s individual psychology — a body of work that would occupy the next three decades of his intellectual life. While Freud and Jung dominated both Western and Japanese psychology, Adler had been largely sidelined. Kishimi made it his task to correct that.
He translated Adler’s major works from German into Japanese, including Introduction to Individual Psychology and The Science of Living, making Adler’s original texts accessible to Japanese readers for the first time in rigorous translation. He also wrote extensively on Adler in Japanese — academic papers, introductory books, philosophical essays — building a body of Adlerian scholarship that had no equivalent in Japan before him.
In the late 2000s, award-winning author Fumitake Koga approached Kishimi after reading one of his Adler introductions. Koga had been searching for a way to present Adlerian psychology to a general audience and saw in Kishimi’s work the philosophical depth the project required. Their collaboration produced Kirawareru Yuuki (嫌われる勇気, “The Courage to Be Disliked”), published in Japan in 2013 by Diamond Inc. The book sold over three million copies in Japan and was translated into more than forty languages.
The English edition, published by Atria Books/Simon & Schuster in 2018 under the title The Courage to Be Disliked, introduced Adlerian thought to Western readers through the book’s Socratic dialogue format — a Youth challenging a Philosopher across five evenings of conversation. The format was deliberate: Kishimi and Koga structured it so that the Youth’s objections would mirror the reader’s own resistance, and the Philosopher’s responses would meet them directly rather than presenting Adler’s ideas as established doctrine.
A sequel, The Courage to Be Happy (Shiawase ni Naru Yuuki), followed in 2016 and was similarly translated internationally. Kishimi continues to write and lecture on Adlerian philosophy in Japan, where he is also active in care ethics — a philosophical tradition examining the ethics of dependence, vulnerability, and caregiving relationships.
