Why Japanese people are so fearful
Prof. Tsuyoshi Miyakawa recently appeared on “Sekai Ichi Uketai Jyugyou” to educate viewers about how Japanese people are more fearful than Westerners:
Through his research, he isolated a gene that supposedly causes one’s brain to feel more fear. In tests with lab mice, those mice that do not have the gene are far more likely to freely walk around on a high platform without safety barriers.
It would seem that some tests have been conducted to determine which countries have more carriers of thie fear gene and Japan ranked at the top of the list:
- Japanese: 97%
- White Americans: 77%
- Indians: 67%
- Germans: 64%
- Black Americans: 46%
- South Africans: 32%
According to Ken Y-N, another Japanese TV show (”Otona no Sonata”) also aired a segment this week about how Japanese people posess genes that make them uniquely fearful. On that show, Westerners and Japanese people were shown walking through a haunted house:
“15 out of 15 Japanese were scared, but just one foreigner. A Russian couple
were laughing at the traps, and a African-Australian wanted to punch the
exhibits…”
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Sounds like more research needs to be done before making such bold declarations.
I dunno, it would certainly explain a lot. I feel like just about all of my female friends are deathly afraid of bugs, reptiles, and anything remotely scary like a haunted house or something… in that whiny “kowai yo~~” kind of way. I’m also a girl and I feel like telling them to just get over it already, hahaha.
I call Bulls***
A “unique” fear gene? Gimme a break.
How do you explain the ethnic Japanese living abroad in, say, Hawaii and California?!
I know a guy with 2 Japanese parents born abroad now living in Japan, and he’s more courageous than me.
And did you know that the Japanese small intestine is one meter longer than the Western small intestine? That’s why they can’t eat Western beef, and why it must be restricted from importation. It’s a scientific fact, people!
Quite a self confident comment you have there. Are you, by any chance, blood type O?
Second hand tale here, but it’s relevant: I heard from a fellow ALT that a Japanese coworker once insisted that she couldn’t speak English because she had a “short tongue.”
HAHAHAHA, pretty pathetic excuse.
No, it’s quite true.
I too suffer from a short tongue. It has made my life as an Englishman very stressful.
My friend, ethnically Danish and Finnish, had trouble with his tongue also and at a young age, his parents asked him if he wanted an elective surgery to cut the tongue frenulum. He did and he had a much easier time speaking.
The condition where the frenulum is short and hampers the movement of the tongue is called ankyloglossia. It might not be the case that your friend has a short tongue, just limited mobility.
It is an anatomical fact that a Japanese has, on average, longer intestine in proportion to one’s height than a Caucasian does. The average size of body parts defers among ethnic groups. You just cannot deny that.
The length of the human small intestine in a healthy adult is pretty much constant, across all ethnic groups, at about 7 meters. It doesn’t matter if the owner of the organ is Wang Zhizhi or Danny Devito, there will not be a significant difference in length. However, Wang’s intestine length will be 3.3 times his height, Devito’s 4.6 times his height. Is Danny Devito’s digestive process therefore 1.4 times more efficient than Wang Zhizhi’s?
No.
“The average size of body parts defers among ethnic groups. You just cannot deny that.”
Actually, yes you can, as there is absolutely zero scientific basis for such a claim.
“Actually, yes you can, as there is absolutely zero scientific basis for such a claim.”
Don’t Durex make different sizes for different global markets? That suggests there is some evidence for at least one body part being a different size….
I’m curious why the separation in multi-ethnic US but not in multi-ethnic Germany, India, or South Africa?
Well I guess because this is supposed to be genetics so it should be broken down by race (and have nothing to do with what country you live in). And I mean South Africa is a place, not a race. Why not jsut say White folk and Black folk. The fact they broke it down this way really lower the credibility of this.
“I’m curious why the separation in multi-ethnic US but not in multi-ethnic Germany, India, or South Africa?”
Because they don’t realize those countries are multi-ethnic.
I think Japanese culture has a tendency to be risk-averse, just like American culture has a tendency to be adventurous. Except when we’re not either of those things. I can find plenty of evidence to refute either assertion, especially as an American living in Japan.
Not sure I give this any more credence than the very disappointing Boyd de Menthe with his “Why the Japanese are Superior People’ thing.
I live as if there are no superior or inferior people. Just people.
This is the worst kind of pseudo-science bullshit. Once you start claiming that a race of people have some kind of unique qualities or attributes, it can be used to justify almost anything. And yes, as noted above, EVERY country on that list is multi-ethnic, not just America, further proving that whoever assembled this “data” is an idiot.
See this for a quick overview of the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HTTLPR
Short answer: the jury is still out, but any differences are very minor.
Thank you for the link. So few people look at actual data and just give knee-jerk responses to media reports from reporters who probably haven’t looked at the data either and wouldn’t understand it if they did. Science reporting is shameful.
So I’m guessing all those Japanese soldiers in WWII were actually cyborgs and not really human beings born in Japan?
well i conducted a study in my house – 2 japanese and 1 foreigner and the foreigner in my house (me) is definitely more fearful. there, a study to contradict.
Frankly, this whole topic worries me.
I was really expecting to see a clip of Japanese people getting scared by stuff. What a disappointment…
So they did a study of the traits of human ethnicities with mice as stand-ins. There was no investigation (on the program at least) into the actual gene itself, so they were basically saying that 97% of Japanese mice are scared to death of heights.
I didn’t know that white American mice were more afraid of Plexiglas floors than black American mice.
If Uri Geller or James Hydrick ever showed up on some Japanese TV show, the country would go into a frenzy. They wouldn’t even think of inviting a kind of James Randi to check it out.
lol. you don’t know how to scare russians
I do! Tell them that there is no more Vodka in Russia…
It sounds like he’s just found some sort of genetic marker which is more prominent in Japanese than other ethnicities and said, “there, that’s the fear gene!” The marker’s true meaning may be something entirely different (like a relationship to skin pigmentation, hair texture or some other nonsense).
The truth is that 95% of human genomes are classified as “junk” by geneticists and the human genome project, which was so triumphant about their now “completed” mapping work, have only figured out and mapped the 5% which they feel is relevant at this time. That leaves a whole lot of wiggle room for hacks to assert that some of the remaining 95% controls whatever they say it does.
Fear is almost certainly related to culture and upbringing. If the Japanese are risk-averse and fearful, it’s because their culture inculcates them to be so.
This is hauntingly reminiscent of Dr. Tsunoda’s theory that the Japanese brain is unique, and that the Japanese brain hears insect noises as music, while the Western brain hears them as noise.
There are more combinations possible in our DNA than there are molecules on planet earth but some guy says he’s narrowed down fear?
This is more and more the kind of recent bull masquerading as science that I’m coming across recently all over the web. It’s disturbing how much non-scientific methodology is being used in the name of science. Don’t these people get a drilling in the dangers of confirmation bias, conflict of interest, etc. in University? Or do they just spend 3 years @rsing around and then sit their final exams? Yep, that’d be it.
P.S. Can somebody turn down the insane spam filter? Quotation marks are part of the English language.
More “science” for the nihonjinron crowd, which is apparently not just a splinter minority of no significance (as some here like to believe).
Ha, I call bullshit.
Japan already has a government-run health care insurance as well as already being a socialist country in essence. The entire nation should have had heart-attacks during social studies class in middle or high school and be dead by now, seeing as how white Americans ranked lower are so raging with fear at Obama merely proposing it!
Jokes aside, the idea that the ONLY differences between different ethnicities and races of people are the kinds visible, like skin color and hair, doesn’t really make any sense. It seems like knee-jerk reaction under the political correctness flag, or some perceived association to eugenics.
It’s a fact that different races tend to have different levels of susceptibilities to various diseases and genetic disorders. So, IF it can be proven that behavioral differences can be attributed to genetics and not just culture, which does seem plausible, than at least this claim wouldn’t be totally absurd.
The video segment says that, serotonin transporters are a protein in the brain that reduces fear, and that genetics are responsible for how much is produced. It’s claimed that 97% of Japanese people have the gene that produces less. That certainly seems plausible to me.
I can’t tell from this video alone where any discrepancies may be, aside from the shoddy classifications of people around the world.
What about toxoplasmosis ? I know that in France, a large amout of the population carry this, and french aren’t known for their willingness to abide laws … Japanese people should eat more raw meat.( and cheese of course )
This all reminds me of the research on how conservatives are more susceptible to fear.
http://www.denverpost.com/politicswestnews/ci_10503487?source=bb
Well, I think it’s because this research was designed for a Japanese audience and likely done by examining people living in Japan. Where are the Koreans or Chinese? Where are the Japanese living abroad? Where are the Ainu? Or were the producers too “afraid” that publicizing certain results might anger someone? The statistics appear staged, and the experiment seems to lack a strict control.
It’s just as much if not more influenced by cultural surroundings than it may be by genetics. Behavior is easily influenced by psychology.
I don’t buy this either. I’ve been to too many scary movies where I was cringing in my seat in terror and the Japanese kids sitting around me were laughing their heads off.
Japanese exceptionalism. It’s no more surprising than American exceptionalism, the doctrine that states that the US version of freedom and democracy is the best way in the world to live because they invented it. I mean, look at their perfect society with no problems whatsoever.
Wow…the poll results are disgusting and rude. This guy did research that cost a lot of time and money and everyone that voted no basically undermined his efforts. Obviously not EVERYONE is 100% gonna be fearful, since even genes work at different levels in each person, so the “Japanese kids sitting around me laughing their heads off” is just one of those cases, and with as many japanese people as there are…it’s a lot. All this said is they’re MORE fearful, not that they’d crap their pants at EVERYTHING, which is what everyone seems to be reading it as.
Fear isn’t based on DNA or genes. Come on. A bit of research on such a matter doesn’t prove a thing. Japanese are more fearful because it is an innate cultural thing. On average, Japanese people are very superstitious and more likely to stick to what they know than change procedure. It comes from thousands of years of history and maintaining a culture built around ceremony and respect.
Kiwis (such as myself), on the other hand, have a very recent history. So taking everything in stride and without a care in the world is just a part of our cultural heritage. And so it is altogether natural for us to experience excitement or surprise more than fear.
When it comes down to it, it’s a psychologically hereditary matter, not a biologically hereditary one.
actually… a lot of things u wouldn’t think of are based on DNA… possibly fear included. even things that seem completely random can be based on dna.
anything that’s hereditary is based in genes.. doh! perhaps you are referring to more environment (cultural) vs genetic
one interesting examples of seemingly random traits being controlled for by genes… is they took flies and put them into a y-maze and let them go. some flies when right, some when left. they took the ones that went left, and bred them together and then ran the test again w/offspring, only keeping offspring that went left-again in the y-maze. they did this for many generations, for both left population and right population. over many generations they created flies that reliably went left or right based on the lineage >90% of the time. if the instinct to go right or left can be determined by genes, there’s no doubt in my mind that levels of fear can also be attributed partially to genes.