Every now and then we see stereotypes saying that Japanese people are all the same, which also happens with other Asian countries, where they claim that everyone has the same face or looks alike. Is that true?
I agree that to this day I still have difficulties in differentiating the nationality of an Asian just by looking at the person. But the case addressed in this subject is the easy recognition of people of the same nationality.
Suppose you know a Japanese person, will you be able to find them in the crowd if they get lost? If a group of Japanese friends takes a picture together, will they confuse each other when it comes to identifying?
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Japanese People Are Not the Same!
Just as we imagine all Japanese people to be the same and similar, Asians think the same about Europeans and other Western nationalities. All of this happens because of a simple Bug in the Brain.
A scientific study took Europeans and Japanese and distributed photos of different ethnicities. The study found that the volunteers easily memorized faces of people from the same ethnicity as them.
The study concluded that the same difficulty Europeans had in identifying photos of Asians, Japanese had in identifying photos of Europeans.
It wasn’t just a recognition test; scientists examined the brains of the volunteers in detail. Simply put, the Japanese thought those blonde Europeans all looked alike and wondered how they could differentiate between each other.
The extra-striate cortex responsible for facial recognition and other parts of the brain used a much greater effort to try to conclude whether that European or Asian face had appeared before or not.
Are Japanese People Similar?
Of course, in Brazil things are different from Europeans and Japanese, all because we live in a huge mix of ethnicities. Brazil lives a reality different from most countries in the world.
Even though Japanese faces are easy to identify among themselves, Japanese people have characteristics that standardize and define them. Generally, they have black hair, are thin, and short.
Japanese people also lived in isolation for thousands of years, making diversification much less than in Brazil and other countries. Not to mention the healthy diet that preserves that youthful face.
From my own experience, I could easily differentiate my Japanese friends in the crowd because I was already used to seeing their faces. By interacting among Japanese people, I can perceive that they have very different faces from each other.
Many Japanese people break the mold by using different clothing and hairstyles. Some even dye their hair, but the vast majority of Japanese people wear the same clothes and have the same hairstyle, further standardizing the ethnicity.
It’s Not Enough to Live Among Japanese People
Studies concluded that even if you move to Japan, you will still end up finding Japanese people similar. Your brain needs to be literally trained to notice the differences, just as you can differentiate your friends.
We are born in an environment and from infancy we see the same styles of faces that help us identify the small differences of each one. This ability becomes even less in Brazil with so many ethnicities.
The fact that a person never travels or rarely sees people of different ethnicities like Asians ends up creating this wrong idea that everyone is similar or the same. I myself cannot find all Japanese people alike due to my experience with Japanese culture.
The same happens within Brazil itself; we can notice striking similarities among Brazilians from each state. There are similarities among Indigenous people, Northeasterners, Gauchos, and many other states and regions.
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