Category: All Things Japanese

From times immemorial, people have tried to come up with ways to make sense of another person’s personality. One way of doing so is to use astrology, where the stars you are born under supposedly influence your personality and the good and bad things happening to you throughout your life. A recent and much more scientific take on personality are the Big Five personality traits that are more or less backed up by psychological research and at least don’t try to predict what’s going to happen to you next week.

Japan however – or should I say: of course – is different. Instead of asking a person for their birth date or astrological sign, the standard question asks for blood type. Supposedly, whether you have A, B, AB, or 0 blood type tells people everything there is to know about your personality, and, of course, with which partner you are most compatible. Let’s list some of the traits upfront:

Type A: kind, compassionate, sensitive, calm, curious, loyal, idealistic, deep and committed but also obsessive, pessimistic, fastidious, stubborn, and easily stressed.

Type B: friendly, outgoing, energetic, expressive, curious, creative, imaginative, independent, and spontaneous but also wild, erratic, not forgiving, selfish, uncooperative, irresponsible, and unpredictable.

Type AB: independent, outgoing, spontaneous, energetic, fun-loving, quick, adaptable, and creative but also complicated, self-centered, irresponsible, vulnerable, indecisive, forgetful, unforgiving, and critical.

Type 0: responsible, practical, strategic, organised, determined, decisive, objective, success-oriented and logical but also jealous, rude, ruthless, insensitive, unpunctual, unpredictable, cold, self-centered and arrogant.

And as for finding the perfect partner: The individual types are best compatible with their own type and with AB, which makes AB blood types the universal donor/recipient in this case.

So, when in Japan, it is good to know your blood type to have a fun conversation topic. Obviously, most Japanese do not believe in this at all, just like most Western people don’t believe in astrology or palm reading. It’s a fun little thing to know and then we all move on with our lives because it doesn’t matter.

Obviously, we do not know who came up with astrology, that is, with the idea that the stars influence life on Earth into a personal level. Of course, when you look at the sky and see the Milky Way every night and its billions of stars, that conclusion does not appear that far-fetched.

Anyway, concerning the blood type theory, we can pin down its origins to a string of people from Japan. Aristotle already believed that personality is inherited through the blood (and may very well be, if you call it by the modern name genetics). However, it really all started in 1901 when my fellow Austrian Karl Landsteiner discovered the AB0 blood types (he received the 1930 Nobel Prize for this, by the way.)

In 1926, Rin Hirano and Tomita Yashima published a clearly racist article called “Blood Type Biologically Related” in an army medical journal. A year later, a professor at Tokyo Women’s Teacher’s School who had no medical training whatsoever, Takeji Furukawa, published a paper on temperament through blood type. The militarist government of the 1930s loved the idea and used it in an attempt to breed better soldiers and to explain the superiority of the ethnic  Japanese over minorities like the Ainu or other countries’ citizens, like the Koreans and Taiwanese. This may have contributed to some of the atrocities being committed in WWII, but thankfully, the idea fell from grace during that time already.

Until, in the 1970s, Masahiko Nomi came along and breathed fresh air into the blood type personality theory, and this time, the Japanese public went with it. Of course, Nomi had no medial training either, but this did not deter him from publishing papers with what he thought was statistically significant data. His son continued in the father’s footsteps, and even established an institute for further research and publication in 2004.

Serious medical/psychological research has been done on the claims of blood type personality, and it did not find any statistically relevant correlations. What little evidence these researchers have found can be explained with the Barnum-effect, with self-fulfilling prophecies, or with similar logical fallacies.

Still, Japanese people are fond of the idea, and blood types are often mentioned in manga, anime, and video games and are even given to serious match making services. To each their own I guess – we have astrology, after all.

PS: In case you’re wondering about me and my blood type: No, it is not true at all what it says about me. I am always VERY punctual!

Summer in Japan means essentially three things: heat, humidity and cicadas. There are about 3000 different species of cicadas worldwide, and Japan itself is home to around 30 species, which can be easily distinguished by their different songs.

The most common cicadas in Japan are the so-called abura semi which literally means “oily cicada”, since their song resembles the sound of frying oil (to the Japanese at least). Even though abura semi are among the largest cicadas here – they measure up to 40 mm – and you hear them everywhere in summer, they blend perfectly into the trees and are very hard to see.

The Japanese abura semi are a yearly species. They emerge in mid July as adults (imago) and from then on live, sing, and mate until late August to early September. Their larvae survive in the ground where they feed off tree roots until they emerge again in the next summer. This is when there are many empty shells left on low leafs and bushes, and it is easy to see that summer has started.

Cicadas don’t come alone, they sit in trees and bushes by the hundreds and sing together to attract females. Every species has its individual song, and they can be extremely loud. Some species can generate up to 120 dB, among the loudest of all sounds produced by insects, rivaling chain saws. And as cicadas can sing for hours, it can get very annoying over time, and it seems a bit unfair (although totally understandable from an evolutionary point of view) that males can disable their “ears” while singing to prevent hearing loss.

How the cicada’s song is produced is very interesting: Essentially it’s by training their muscles! Male cicadas have so-called tymbals (noisemakers) in their abdomens, and they click every time the internal muscles are flexed, and a second time upon relaxing them again. In addition, the abdomen of male cicadas is pretty much hollow, which amplifies each click. When many cicadas come together, these clicks blend together to a single soundscape where individual clicks or even a single insect are not distinguishable at all.

Another interesting tidbit about cicadas is that they cannot jump, but they do fly. They are not dangerous at all to humans, but when one of those large abura semi comes right at you with a deep buzz, it can be quite scary. Besides their perfect mimicry which makes them hard to see on the trees they sit on, they also practice “playing dead” when they are being disturbed. In the last weeks, I have nudged quite a few cicadas that were lying on their backs in front of my apartment, just to have them fly off again with some extra indignant clicks.

As mentioned above, cicadas are one of those beloved Japanese insects that are often used to denote a season in art. While the Japanese don’t eat them like the Chinese do, they are significant in Japanese culture. And although they may not make quite as pretty a motif for paintings as the grasshopper, cicadas have inspired many poets over the ages because they signify the shortness of existence.

The song of the cicadas leaves nothing visible from their near death.
Basho