All Look Same: C, K, J link

I'd encourage anyone who hasn't already tried it out to go take the All Look Same test. It's been on the internet for a while, and the editor keeps adding other tests, like the food test and the architecture test. The basic test simply gives you an Asian face and three choices: Chinese, Korean or Japanese.

I've explained the difference many times in my life but I think people don't always listen to me. Non-Asians so often feel either undeserved guilt or undeserved pride over the subject. Here's one way to sum it up:

1. If you think you can always tell Asians apart, you are not as smart as you think.
2. If you can never tell Asians apart, you might be as ignorant as you think.

Another way is to use a European metaphor. Take a Frenchman, a German man and an Englishman. Let's say they are all very average-looking people of average height, white, and dressed for a casual evening. You see them in a train station and try to guess their nationality. If you have any familiarity with Europeans, your chances are pretty good. The German's fashion sense is just a bit off. The Englishman has ears that stick out. The Frenchman does a unique kind of shoulder roll and holds his cigarette at an especially jaunty angle. There's a combination of dress cues, body language cues and genetic facial cues that separate the men.

Then, take facial profiles of these men with neutral expressions and try to distinguish them. Your chances will go way down. There's a facial type that's more typical of Germans, English and French -- the kind of face that you would see on a travel poster advertising the country -- but the majority of the white people in that country are in a wider range. There are plenty of Englishmen with ears that lie flat against their head, blond Frenchmen and brown-haired Germans.

There are more "typical" Chinese, Japanese and Korean faces, but even these faces could easily belong to a different group than the group they supposedly typify. From my perspective, I never try to tell any Asian apart if they're not foreigners or first-generation immigrants. The only thing I do is look at their name, and even that can be misleading sometimes.

One fascinating thing I've learned about human genetics is that there's more genetic variety within the African continent than there is outside of it. In other words, a Japanese, Norwegian and Cherokee have much more in common genetically than an Ethiopian, a Nigerian and a South African. If you look at someone of Khoisan descent (most famously, Nelson Mandela) and compare their facial features to a typical West African, there are very, very few similarities. Skin color, bone structure, feature size, everything is different. The human species has lived in Africa longer, and we've had more time there to grow apart.

Anyway, getting back to my perspective, I can tell Chinese, Japanese and Koreans apart only under certain circumstances. They have to be nationals or first-generation immigrants. If I hear them speak, I can distinguish Japanese easily and Chinese somewhat easily, mostly from watching so many Chinese martial arts movies. I can’t always distinguish Cantonese from Mandarin. I can tell Korean speech mostly by process of elimination, since I've never lived in a place where there were many Koreans and don't really have a feel for the language. If there are other Asian countries in the equation, especially countries that have more cultural diversity than Japan or Korea, I basically throw my hands in the air.

If I don't hear them speak, I can always distinguish Japanese by body language. Japanese often use a very distinctive posture that I call "ready-to-bob" mode. In any given social situation, unless a Japanese person is a) very relaxed b) very absorbed in something c) very drunk, they will hold their shoulders, neck and head in ready-to-bob mode. Head-bobbing is a natural part of a Japanese conversation and it's hard to describe when it's done… it can be a sign of social deference and politeness, of greeting, of nervousness and discomfort, of acknowledgement, of happiness, of agreement or of determination. And when someone else bobs their head, you respond by bobbing your head. It's infectious. If you're not used to this and you do it all day, you'll actually get a crick in your neck.

I believe Chinese and Korean people also have head-bowing in their repertoire of body language, but nothing that approaches the frequency of Japanese head-bobbing. They also have less of a physical comfort zone. When I went to China, I was initially shocked at how people would get up in my face during conversations, and how they would elbow and jostle each other. The group dynamics are completely different.

It's better not to make assumptions in the first place, but it's understandable that someone with little knowledge of Korea and Japan would mistake who is from where. Going only from facial cues, I think it can be just as easy as mistaking an American for a Canadian, or a Mexican for a Guatemalan. But the consequences of that mistake are more severe.

For example, in a Spanish class I took in Mexico, we had several Korean students. We were doing a unit on national holidays. The teacher asked a young Korean woman what they did in a typical holiday in Japan. The response was an immediate explosion of "¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡NOOOOOOO, NO SOY JAPONESA!!!! ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡NO SOY JAPONESA!!!!! The teacher staggered back a little bit and never made the mistake again.