Society and Culture
A popular belief in Japan is that a person's ABO blood type is predictive of their personality, character, and compatibility with others. This belief is also widespread elsewhere in Asia, notably Taiwan and South Korea. Deriving from ideas of historical scientific racism, the theory reached Japan in a 1927 psychologist's report, and the militarist government of the time commissioned a study aimed at breeding better soldiers. The fad faded in the 1930s due to its lack of scientific basis and ultimately the discovery of DNA in the following decades which it later became clear had a vastly more complex and important role in both heredity generally and personality specifically. No evidence has been found to support the theory by scientists, but it was revived in the 1970s by Masahiko Nomi, a broadcaster with a background in law who had no scientific or medical background. Despite these facts, the myth still persists widely in Japanese popular culture.
Read more about this topic: Blood Type
Famous quotes containing the words society and, society and/or culture:
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)