I can name a bunch of black ones — Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Oprah, Michael Irvin, Deon Sanders, etc, but I can’t name any Japanese superstars. The NYT wrote last week: “In Japan, a Beloved Deaf Composer Appears to Be None of the Above”
I’m watching KABC TV News this afternoon and this bloke Rob Fukuzaki does the sports capably enough, but he has no charisma. According to his official bio, “He was the first male Japanese-American TV anchor in Los Angeles local TV News.” Well, when you watch him, you can understand that. The Japanese are great at building electronics, bombing Pearl Harbor, and developing an advanced economy and culture, but they don’t zing with charisma.
Why not? Charisma is largely a function of testosterone and blacks tend to have more testosterone than whites and whites tend to have more testosterone than orientals.
Interestingly, many of the most striking racial differences can be thought of as resembling faint sex differences. For example, contrast the triumph of Japanese manufacturing with Japan’s near-total failure in the brutally competitive global market for celebrities. (A recent survey revealed that Americans believe the most famous living Japanese person is Bruce Lee, a dead Chinese guy.) It’s the mirror image of African-Americans’ undistinguished technological achievements versus their outstanding performance in producing media personalities.
Why? Japanese talents extend far beyond chopstick-handling to a set of extremely masculine intellectual skills. Tests show they tend to excel at objective abilities like mathematics and mentally manipulating 3-d objects through “single-tasking” (focusing deeply upon a one impersonal logical problem). Blacks, on the other hand, are often better at typically feminine, more subjective cerebral skills like verbalization, emotional intuition and expression, sense of rhythm, sense of style, improvisation, situational awareness, and mental multi-tasking. Michael Jordan’s brain, for instance, enables him to anticipate his opponent’s every move while simultaneously demoralizing his foe with nonstop trash-talking. (Try it sometime. It’s not easy.)
Next, think about physical and emotional/personality traits. Here the races are arrayed in the opposite order. Blacks tend to display more of typically male qualities like muscularity, aggressiveness, self-esteem, need for dominance, and impulsiveness. In contrast, the Japanese economy benefits from a male workforce endowed with more typically feminine virtues like small fingers and fine motor skills, cooperativeness, humility and anxiety, loyalty, long-term orientation, diligence, and carefulness. Combined with their first-rate masculine mental skills, these make Japanese companies powerhouses at exporting superbly engineered machinery.
Compared to Japanese organizations, black communities tend to be physically and psychologically masculine, sometimes to the point of disorderliness. Yet a relatively high percentage of individual black men achieve fame by possessing charismatically masculine looks and personalities, without the nerdishness that Dilbert-style male intellectual skills often induce.
Like astronomer Tycho Brahe’s attempt at a compromise between the theories of Ptolemy and Copernicus, Landes’s notion that geography influences culture but not genes may someday be seen as a waystation between the 20th Century social scientist’s flat-earthish insistence that nothing affects culture except culture, and the 21st Century’s exploration of the fascinating interactions among environment, genes, and culture.
While interracial marriage is increasingly accepted by whites, a surprising number of Asian men and black women are bitterly opposed. Why?
…The heart of the problem for Asian men and black women is that intermarriage does not treat every sex/race combination equally: on average, it has offered black men and Asian women new opportunities for finding mates among whites, while exposing Asian men and black women to new competition from whites.
…Muscularity may most sharply differentiate the races in terms of sexual attractiveness. Women like men who are stronger than they; men like women who are rounder and softer. The ending of segregation in sports has made racial differences in muscularity harder to ignore.
