Japanese people are shorter than Koreans. The average height of men born in 1996 is 174.9 cm in Korea, while that in Japan is 170.8 cm, which is 4.1 cm shorter.
Comparing Korean and Japanese women in the same age group (20-29 years old), the average height is 161.3 cm for Koreans, while the figure for Japanese women is less than 160cm (157.9cm).
What’s more surprising is that Japanese people have generally become shorter over the past 10,000 years. According to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the average height of 17-year-old Japanese people in 1994 was 170.9 cm for men and 158.1 for women. Comparing these to the figures 30 years later, it showed that the Japanese have become shorter.
Some studies also show that the average height of Japanese people has not increased for the past 10,000 years. According to a paper published in 1972 by Yoshisuke Hiramoto, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, the average height of men in the Edo period (1603-1867) was 157.1cm.
On the other hand, the Jomon people were 159.1 cm tall, 2 cm taller than the Edo people. These figures were estimated based on the length of the remaining femur bones. The Jomon people lived in the Japanese Islands about 12,000 to 2500 years ago.
Analysts say that the expansion of rice farming has increased nutritional intake and made people on the Korean Peninsula and in China grow taller. However, Japanese people became smaller after entering Kamakura and Edo periods.
Emperor Tenmu issued a ban on meat eating in 675, and this ban lasted for 1200 years until it was lifted in 1875. This is a hypothesis that explains why the average height of Japanese people decreased compared to that of 10,000 years ago. Japanese people began to eat meat after the Meiji period (1867-1902). As productivity increased dramatically due to modernization, the Japanese began to grow rapidly.
In 2016, NCD-RisC, an international epidemiological research group, conducted a survey on the height of people born in 200 countries around the world in 100 years between 1896 and 1996. Japan ranked 5th on the list of countries with the largest increases in height as men grew 14.6 cm, and women grew 16 cm within 100 years.
Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that Japanese people, who had been growing so well, have not seen any increase in height over the past 30 years. In 1999, the Japanese Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology pointed out that if a woman with a BMI of 18 to 24 should weigh 7-10 kg less than that during pregnancy. This figure is significantly lower than that in other countries.
In the 1980s, a paper in Japan showed that women who did not gain a lot of weight during pregnancy were more effective in preventing preeclampsia. As a result of forcibly restricting the weight of pregnant women, the number of underweight babies born under 2500g has increased in Japan. The fact that underweight children tend to be short even as adults is proven through various domestic and international research results.
Morisaki Naho, head of the Social Medicine Research Department at the National Center for Adult Medical Research, said, “Due to the increase in low birth weight, children born in 2014 are 1.5 cm shorter for males and 0.6 cm shorter for females than those born in 1980 when they reach adulthood”.
Only last year, the Japanese Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology increased the limit of the appropriate weight gain for pregnant women to similar levels to other countries.
Perhaps because the perception of avoiding meat still remains, the recipe for baby food in Japan is the opposite of Korea today. In Japan, the “country of manuals”, the district office sent Japanese booklets on how to cook baby food. In Korea, ground beef is said to help children grow up. Instead, flour foods are avoided because they cause allergies and indigestion. Koreans also tend to avoid fish in the upper part of the food chain because heavy metals may be piled up in the body.
Japan is the opposite. If you look at the baby food recipes for each month from 5 to 6 months to 12 to 18 months distributed by Minato-ku, Tokyo, there is no meat at all, but white fish and udon noodles are included instead. Except for white fish, it can be said that Japanese babies are raised by being fed almost only grass until 18 months of age.
When asked why they include udon instead of meat in baby food, the Japanese explained, “There is a lot of perception among Japanese that meat is greasy and not good for children, and udon is not a problem because it ages flour dough.”
Perhaps because of this influence, Japanese people have already grown to their maximum height genetically, so research shows that it is difficult to be smaller in the future. Based on the results of analyzing the genomes of about 190,000 Japanese people in 2019, the National Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan announced, “There is a possibility that genetic mutations that cause height growth may have been eliminated.”
Hisao Baba, a researcher at the National Museum of Science, explained, “It is possible that the average height of the Japanese has reached a genetically possible limit.”
Source: nate
