Playing to type in Japan

What with absurdly high levels of belief in astrology, sky fairies, homeopathy, and whatnot, it sometimes seems like the United States of America has the market cornered in superstitious nonsense. Far from it. The Chinese, for example, have their penchant for quack remedies concocted from rare species (the more endangered the better). Now we learn that the Japanese, not to be outdone by either of their geopolitical and economic rivals, appear to have recently acquired a bizarre belief in the power of blood types to determine one's destiny.

Here's the essential bits of a story by the New York Times' David Picker:

In Japan, using blood type to predict a person's character is as common as going to McDonald's and ordering a teriyaki burger. The association is akin to the equally unscientific use of astrological signs by Americans to predict behavior, only more popular. It is widely believed that more than 90 percent of Japanese know their blood type.

"In everyday life in Japan, blood type is used as a kind of a social lubricant, a conversation starter," said Theodore Bestor, a professor of Japanese studies and anthropology at Harvard University. "It's a piece of information that supposedly gives you some idea of what that person is like as a human being.

Blood type obsession isn't unique to Japan by any means. For the last decade, one of the most popular fad diets in the U.S. has been Peter D'Adamo's Blood Type Diet, in which he assigns members of each of the four main blood type groups their own regimen of foods to consume and avoid.

His book, Eat Right 4 Your Type, was on the bestseller lists for what seemed like eons, despite a complete absence of scientific evidence to support his central thesis - that our body's immune system reacts differently to different foods, and those reactions are determined by the various antigens specific to blood type: A, B. AB, and O.

It's impossible to list all the things wrong with D'Adamo's notions. For one thing, he advises Type Bs to drink lots of milk, despite the fact that millions of Type Bs in southeast Asia and elsewhere are lactose-intolerant. He also completely confuses his anthropological history, trying to sort out which haplotypes determining blood types arose where and when, but at the end of the day, it's his reluctance to subject his hypothesis to a scientific test that does him in, at least among those of us who care about such things.

The Japanese, however, don't stop at just diet. They reportedly believe your very essence as a human being is tied to those blood cell antigens. And many have concluded that even prowess at baseball is tied to blood type.

In Japan, people with Type O are commonly referred to as warriors because they are said to be self-confident, outgoing, goal-oriented and passionate. According to Masahiko Nomi, a Japanese journalist who helped popularize blood typology with a best-selling book in 1971, people with Type O make the best bankers, politicians and -- if you are not yet convinced -- professional baseball players.

All of which really has me baffled. I mean, baseball has got to be the least war-like of all the professional sports. So what good does a warrior-like attribute do for a pitcher or a batter? But I digress. Back to the story.

Can any of these correlations be scientifically supported? The medical community does not think so, Even in Japan, they are accepted on faith.

"There's absolutely no evidence that you can predict batting average by blood type or that there are different character traits that you can define by blood type," said Marc Siegel, an associate professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. "To me, it lines up with astrology. Some people will say if you're a Gemini, you're more aggressive. I know a surgeon that will only operate on certain phases of the moon. But there's absolutely no scientific evidence."

That's right. There's absolutely no scientific evidence. And yet, this is precisely the sort of thing that even a modest research grant could sort out. We all fall neatly into one of four convenient blood types. The vast majority can be assigned to just three, actually, as ABs are exceedingly rare. So it should be a relatively easy matter to determine if there is any truth to the notion that personality types and career success is tied to blood type.

But then, the same applies to astrology, and 3500 years of failed horoscopic predictions haven't put that one to bed yet. So I don't suppose the Japanese will grow out of their blood type delusion any time soon. The thing that has me curious is how the belief arose in the first place. ABO blood types were only discovered at the outset of the 20th century by Austrian scientist Karl Landsteiner (who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1930 for his work) and, working independently and concurrently, by Czech serologist Jan Janský. We now know that there are at least 12 other ways to distinguish blood "types" according to immunological response-- a fact that D'Adamo and the Japanese conveniently ignore -- although ABO is the best known and arguably the most important .

A, B and O types were first identified only in 1901, and AB not until six years after that. So it's not like Japan has this centuries- or millennia-long tradition clouded in the mist of time -- like, say, monotheism is. The idea that you can separate one individual's personality and destiny from another based on blood type is a modern phenomenon, one that evolved alongside relativity, quantum physics and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Were the Japanese really that out of the loop?

Considering Japan's considerable technological and scientific prowess these days, it would be unfair to impute to much important to this blood-type obsession. But it's still disappointing to learn that superstitious twaddle can still arise this late in history, with the inertia of generations to keep it alive.