In Japan, there is a belief that a person’s personality is linked to their blood type. This may sound strange, but the idea is not too dissimilar to
What does your blood type say about you?
Okay, let’s get the fun part out of the way first. For the curious out there, this is what Ketsueki-gata says about the different blood types.
Type A blood: According to a casual internet search, people with
Type B blood: Individuals with Type B blood are thought to be strong, passionate, decisive, and empathetic, but they are also more selfish, erratic, unforgiving, and wild. People with this type of blood are seen as being quite
Type AB blood: If you have AB type blood, you get the best of both worlds. According to Ketsueki-gata, you’re likely to be regarded as rational, composed, sociable, and adaptable. But you can also be unreliable, critical, indecisive, and aloof. AB type blood is the rarest in Japan, so people with it are often seen as eccentric.
Type O blood: These individuals are confident, strong-willed, optimistic, and natural leaders. But they are also competitive, insecure, and likely workaholics. According to this system of thinking, Type O people are not meant to get on with type A people.
There are other blood types out there – Ketsueki-gata was only designed to account for these main types.
Ketsueki-gata’s darker origins
The knowledge that there are different
The influence of Western
In 1916, a Japanese doctor called Kimata Hara published a paper connecting blood groups to personalities, especially national-cultural temperament. The idea was further linked to those salient among Western eugenicists by the German-trained Japanese geneticist and physician,
Furuhata not only published influential research on serology in international journals, but also wrote in Japanese newspapers about blood-type character analysis at a time when the country was increasing its imperialist aggression. Then, in the late 1920s, a popular social psychologist called Tokeji Furukawa published a paper called
Furukawa sensationalized and simplified the idea, merging research into the racial distribution of blood types with his own brand of psychological concepts. After this, the popularity of the idea ebbed and flowed until it took off again in the 1970s, when it was picked up by the journalist
From then on, Ketsueki-gata became a recurring theme within many books and self-help guides. It was especially
This article is part of Inconceivable series debunking unscientific stories on the Internet.
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