Blood types in Japan

In Japan they ask your blood type even if you wanna go to the toilet! Just joking, but seriusly talking they usually ask it when you register in websites, in job interviews, when you meet a new person he/she asks your blood type before your age, my workmates know everyone’s blood type in the office and it is usually a conversation theme… As you can see they are pretty obsessed with it.

They believe in some superstitions and pseudo scientific theories that associate blood types with personalities. Everything started from an article written by a professor in 1916, the title was “A study about temperament using blood types”. Even thought he wrote the article with very few scientific evidences it started to become pretty popular and started to be used by the nationalist government in order to select new soldiers depending on their blood type. The “theory” explains that people from group O are more aggressive and passionate, so they are better to be trained as soldiers.

During the 70’s and 80’s many books about blood types where written and it became a national phenomenon. These books explain how you should select a partner depending on your blood type compatibility, how to behave with your friends depending on their blood types, when you should marry depending on your blood type…. Is like a horoscope, in fact in many Japanese magazines there is a “blood type horoscope” section.

If you are interested here are some ideas described by the Japanese blood type “theories”:

• Type A: perfectionist, shy, intellectual, patient, stubborn.
• Type B: does things the easy way, individualist, thinking over feelings.
• Type O: social, born to be a leader, arrogant, extroverted
• Type AB: “cool”, balanced, is a mix of the previous types.

And here you have the compatibilities between types, will get along with a type B? Or is a type O better for you?:

• A is compatible with other A and also AB.
• B is compatabile with other B and AB.
• AB is compatible with AB, B, A and O.
• O is compatible with O and AB.

40% of Japanese are type B. I don’t even know my type yet, at Japanese are surprised when I tell them “I don’t know my blood type”, but the advantage is they will not judge me using a priori just using my blood type.

If you wanna know more about all this blood type/personalty stuff continue reading at this article from wikipedia.