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/or culture:
“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
“... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)