The obsession with Japanese uniqueness (biological, cultural, linguistic, geographic, sociological, psychological, etc.) became quite a cottage industry in postwar Japan and is collectively referred to as nihonjinron [1].
You'll find plenty of grains of truth in these works but also some really bonkers pseudoscience ("Japanese are descended from a different set of primates"). It's not a monolithic movement so much as a strain of thought that can color mainstream works to varying degrees as well as popular opinion due to decades of being bombarded with these factoids by Japanese media.
A friend of mine, who's Caucasian, was living in Japan and had to go to the hospital once. The doctor asked him what the normal body temperature was for a white person. The doctor didn't really believe him when he said it's the same as the Japanese.
Before drugs developed outside Japan are approved for use in Japan, as part of the approval process they will test the drugs on Japanese using "foreigners" as a control. And it doesn't really matter where the foreigner is from, either. Like you could have a drug developed in Germany and they'll happily grab a random Aussie for the trial. Years ago I knew a guy who made extra money every few months doing this.
That's because it's not the same. When my japanese wife has the same body temperature as mine, she has a (slight) fever.
Edit: Conversely, my body temperature when I have a slight fever would be considered serious.
Take it with a grain of salt because this is from a pharmaceutical group, but this page claims the average body temperature of the Japanese was 36.89°C 50 years ago and that it was 36.20°C as of 2009.
http://www.sawai.co.jp/kenko-suishinka/illness/200909-02.htm...
Edit: although, that might as well be due to the aging population. That said, I have been told that my average (by France standards) temperature was "a little high".
I wonder if there's a diet component. When I lived in Japan, after a while my temperature was an average 0.3 degrees lower than it used to be before. It returned back to what it used to be before after leaving Japan and switching to a different diet
I used to hear a story, not sure if it was made up or not about Japan objecting to rossignol skis because, it was claimed, Japanese snow was not like European snow.
And apparently it was true[1]. It was claimed by an industry go up [Consumer Product Safety Association]. Some other equally comical claims was that Japanese stomachs were too small to consume American oranges...
To be fair, Japanese strawberries are heaps better since they actually allow the damn things to ripen before they try to sell them. Same goes for tomatoes. Most tomatoes and strawberries sold in the US taste like cold diarrhea in comparison.
I had always heard that the "longer intestines" story was a myth promoted by the Japanese government during World War II, with the dual goal of promoting the idea of Japanese "uniqueness/superiority" and of discouraging the consumption of meat, which had become very scarce during wartime.
An interesting article, which begs another question. Are the intestines of Japanese bigger compared to those of neighbouring Asians - the Chinese and the Koreans (from whom they apparently descended despite a reluctance to accept this fact) ? This should answer the question of whether it's the genetics at play or the diet itself.
Remember the American doctor mentioned Asian women and not Japanese. Statistically speaking there is a higher chance that the woman with long intestines happens to be Chinese. His comment also brings up another interesting question as to whether the lengths of male and female intestine are different. Why did he mention women specifically?
Modern Japanese are an admixture of earlier aboriginals who populated the islands first and an isolated group of later immigrants that was likely distinct from other East Asian groups. There is plenty of room for them to have unique phenotypes due to this.
Japanese and Koreans are basically the same people, genetically and linguistically. At least among the consensus of non Japanese researchers. Japanese uniqueness infects the humanities as well...
English speaking countries: UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada. Last time I checked they all came from the UK so are genetically the same. So his definition is correct, friend.
Read the context, friend. The original comment this guy replied to was pointing out that people may have different traits because of their exposed environment even though they had same origins. Are we all same people since we are all homo sapiens? Is a Japanese person whose great great grandfather was an American "same people" as pure breed Japanese? What is "Same people" anyway?
This seems like something that could be settled fairly trivially by a couple of morticians' offices in the west, and in Japan, just by measuring the intestines of the recently deceased for a few months.
From what I see in movies, intestines are fairly stretchy. Do you measure without tension? How does one do that? Under 1g tension? What if that turns out to make a difference because Japanese intestines are longer but harder to stretch?
Also, do you correct for body length, for body volume, or for neither?
Because of that, it probably is best to do it double-blind. That would make the experiment a lot more expensive.
It seems a sure-fire road to a Nobel prize (of the Ig variety), though, so why hasn't this been done yet?
> From what I see in movies, intestines are fairly stretchy. Do you measure without tension? How does one do that? Under 1g tension? What if that turns out to make a difference because Japanese intestines are longer but harder to stretch?
> Also, do you correct for body length, for body volume, or for neither?
Start by doing none of the above, but simply measuring the intestines, and recording the data, along with all the things you mentioned above. Statistical analyses can be done after, to see if there's anything interesting in the data at all.
Not sure how to address the tension question; I guess ideally, you'd have someone fly around to Japan and a few other countries, and demonstrate some arbitrary method of measurement. But that starts to get expensive.
"Blinding should be pretty easy and cheap - have an assistant cover up the head with a sheet as the measurement is made."
But you would need to move the body, or have an experimenter who doesn't know whether he is in Japan (using Japanese living abroad or westerners living in Japan for the experiment is for the follow-up study)
Also, but that's relatively minor, covering the head is insufficient. There are lots of other cues, such as skin color, tattoos, missing little fingers, body size, etc. that correlate well with being Japanese as opposed to being a westerner. I would have the assistant cut out everything from the stomach down (even though there is a sphincter, if the size difference is small, specifying where the intestines start will be a challenge) and empty it before handing it over to the experimenter (indirectly, to prevent communication between assistant and experimenters)
"Missing little fingers"? I've never been to Japan, but as far as I know, most folks aren't in the Yakuza.
Also, I wouldn't be super worried about blinding in this case - a length measurement is not particularly subjective. I cannot see how unconscious bias would reasonably add 20-50% (postulated effect size) to intestine length. I'd personally consider the results valid even without blinding, provided a rigid procedure was chosen for measuring intestine length.
I was intrigued by this and did some very quick searching. Here is an article from 1948 which suggests that dietary differences are responsible for longer intestines in Japanese and Russians:
Here is a review which mentions several articles in which investigators looked at intestinal length among westerners and Japanese, but the authors concluded that it was difficult to perform direct comparisons due to differences in measurement techniques.
You should definitely send that to the author. After reading the (very enjoyable but inconclusive) article, I'm sure his 30 years quest could see some more data and, well, some more decades.
When I was in Japan someone offhandedly told me that too, and I thought it was strange. They said it as an explanation of why there aren't massively muscular Japanese men walking around everywhere like there supposedly are in the US (it's probably just because weight-lifting isn't as popular in Japan as in the west).
I would assume that a longer intestine would be better at absorbing nutrition from your food. So this explanation is actually the opposite of what I would expect.
It really seems like they've switched cause and effect around, they eat a less energy dense/harder to absorb diet, and their intestines get longer to compensate, also they don't buff up as much, because they have to work harder for their nutrition.
> it's probably just because weight-lifting isn't as popular in Japan as in the west
Don't discount the role of genetics. Some people are just naturally larger, others couldn't get large even if they tried. Although Japanese people would no doubt be bigger if there was more of a weightlifting culture, they'd still be slimmer than the average American.
And Japanese diets tend to have more soy which could lead to the explanation as to why Japanese men on average have more feminine characteristics. Studies have gone either way in suggesting this.
From left to right, American, North Korean, South Korean.
A empirical illustration of both the role of genetic factors (American vs. South Korean) and the role of non-genetic factors (South Korean vs. North Korean)
In the context of this discussion, it's really the NK vs. SK soldier that is interesting. The people of both N. & S. Korea are pretty close genetically, and presumably NK does not send their shrimps.
It would not surprise me if the South sent tall soldiers as well for such visible duty. While not directly relevant, it was slightly disorienting at the Forbidden City in Beijing when a group Chinese soldiers jogged by, every one of them well over six feet tall . . . absolute giants compared to the average people I saw around.
Various groups of human populations will have varying sorts of phenotypes, depending on the original conditions of their population.
The 'long Japanese colon' may be related to the fact that Japanese are also better at digesting seaweed than other populations: http://www.wired.com/2010/04/sushi-guts/
A really great read. But of all the inquiries and search results only a single one smacked of anything but anecdote
That led me to yet another Japanese doctor, a man who offered to
compare intestinal lengths printed in U.S. and Japanese medical
texts. According to him, they were pretty much the same.
A family member of mine with diagnosed Celiac, 50% Dutch 50% German, now dreads his bi-yearly colonoscopies (as he has hit that age) as he has to be fully put under for what is normally an outpatient procedure because his intestines are now unusually long as a result of ~30-50 years of untreated, unknown Celiac. The doctor apparently acted like this is not an unusual thing. No other known factors would produce this result (i.e. my family is not otherwise known for large intestines in the other family members of the colonoscopy age).
This proves nothing specific about the Japanese, but does demonstrate that apparently environmental factors can affect intestine length, and the relevant medical communities consider this boring background knowledge rather than a research topic or urban legend. It is likely in this family member's case that the Celiac only kicked in fully in his 20s, so it is likely all the "environmental factors" occurred in full adulthood (though it is hard to be sure).
(I'm unclear on how long intestines make it harder to digest meat, though. Being overprovisioned for a task does not generally make the task more difficult. I'd find it more likely that it's simply a matter of gut flora adapting to the local diet and not liking deviations. It's the same reason vegetarians can think meat is bad for everybody because when they eat a bit of meat they have a bad, gassy reaction; their gut flora is not adapted for it. (If meat is indeed bad for everyone, that isn't why.) It is easy to be correct about some fact and really, really wrong about the reason behind the fact.)
It's well established that carnivores have much shorter intestinal tracts. Meat is relatively easy to digest and simply doesn't need a long break down and absorption process. So we know meat eaters don't need long intestines like herbivores.
Now, as to your question about long intestines making it harder to digest meat. They don't do that in exclusion, they make living at all more difficult, and digesting meat is a sub task of living. Research a bit on all the digestive troubles of horses and cows, colic and the like, and you'll find out that massive, long systems of intestines and stomachs have a lot that can go wrong and kill the animal.
Long intestines let the animal live off easier to catch food, yes, but there are definite drawbacks.
Not necessarily relevant to meat, but, if your intestines are too long, then you might be at risk for over-digesting something , dehydrating it into a hard mass that is difficult for the rest of the sytem to process.
In fact, most of Japanese intestines are shorter than Americans' ones.
The length of intestines are not relating to their races.
It's just relating to their height and age.
In 1995, British and Japanese research institutes reported as 'International Colorectal Disease'.
In 2004, Tokyo University also reported similar subject.
Both reports completely denied the story like "Japanese intestines are 1.5x longer".
I think many Japanese believe this kind of stories,
it's because one Japanese drug company made false advertisement to boost their products.
After all, this is Pseudoscience.
What a ridiculous article. If you take the most cursory look you'll see that the Japanese have the same length of colons as non-Japanese. While the story itself is interesting, it's irritating that the author doesn't even bother looking at the science.
Question: Do we know that there are any benefits of having longer or shorter intestines? Is the decreasing of elasticity linked to any problems, or is it just muscles that are more worked out and has no effect at all? Is there any research done on the subject at all?
This article is totally wrong.
In 2004, Tokyo University sampled, and reported in detail.
Many Japanese believe this story though.
The report completely denied this story.
Japanese and Americans, there are no big differences.
I'm just going to assume that the answer is "no"; otherwise, the title would be phrased as "Japanese intestines are longer" or "Japanese intestines might be longer".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron
You'll find plenty of grains of truth in these works but also some really bonkers pseudoscience ("Japanese are descended from a different set of primates"). It's not a monolithic movement so much as a strain of thought that can color mainstream works to varying degrees as well as popular opinion due to decades of being bombarded with these factoids by Japanese media.