All look the same?

[Deleted]

Can you tell Japanese from Korean from Chinese or do they all look the same?

Here is your chance to see if you can distinguish the nationalities.

alllooksame.com/register.php?tid=1

(requires a very short, non invasive registration)

I did awful: 7

I really thought I would do much better.

[onlymark]

I got 7 as well. I think that is the default number.

Did you try the buildings one?
I got 10 for that.

[Deleted]

I got only 3. I can't tell Japanese from Korean.

[ilbonit0]

I actually interviewed the inventor of that test in my previous life as a freelance magazine journalist! I came across it when I lived in Japan and did it with my language students when I lived in Tokyo - they all did woefully....

Its a little harder because the fashions are so dated - and that is the best clue to Japanese vs Korean vs Chinese rather than facial features. The pictures are from, like, the 80s...

[frenchmystiquetour]

Consistent with the rest of my life, I am below average. Another 3 here. Guess my career as a racial profiler just went down the tubes. Either that, or they all look the same. I'll finish the other exams later and then post my likely substandard results.

[hwinpp]

4.

[bixaorellana]

You all!!!!

I should have done the worst -- far worse than the rest of you, since I have never lived where there is any concentration of people of Asian descent.

I got 10!

What was interesting was that the ones I got wrong were the ones about which I was most unsure.

[rikita]

4... i really just randomly guessed... i wasn't sure about any of them (well maybe with a few i thought this or that was more likely)... but then, i only ever had to do with very few japanese, korean or chinese people in my life... when i see tourists i sometimes wonder where they are from, but i am never able to guess...

i kind of think i wouldn't do that much better though if it was say, germans, czechs and polish people or something like that...

[nycgirl]

I got 8. I should have done a lot better, seeing as how I have aunts, uncles, and cousins who are Chinese and Japanese.

[hwinpp]

I got 8 as well just now. My colleagues, who go on and on about being able to distinguish by looks alone, got 7 or worse and were surprised!

[bixaorellana]

Well, yeah! They call it offensive because it is offensive. Google Play had an obligation to squelch this thing instead of offering it as a fun app.
inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/26/asian-americans-speak-out-against-google-app-they-call-offensive/?iref=obinsite

[Deleted]

I remember in Vietnam taking the bus down from Hanoi to Da Nang, we stopped at a major rest stop and restaurant for all of the tourist buses, the woman in charge of our group asked me "Can you help me with the group? They all look the same to me." And just about exactly the same thing happened at a tourist stop around the Phi Phi Islands in Thailand.

Meanhwile, regarding that ridiculous Google app, I suppose that Westerners could find offensive all of those ultra round eyes they use in Japanese animation.

[nutraxfornerves]

How to tell the Japs (sic) from the Chinese

This was published in Life Magazine shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack. It's interesting to note the word choices for the descriptions--negative connotations for the "Japs" and more positive for the Chinese.. Chinese have parchment yellow complexions and are tall & slender; Japanese are earthy yellow and short & squat.

When I traveled in China in the early 1980s, you had to go on a tour and you had to have a Chinese guide in addition to the one provided by the tour company. One one trip, we had a very gringo-looking tour company guide, who spoke Chinese. The American guide told me that the Chinese guide had confided that "You Americans all look alike. All pink and spotted."

[bixaorellana]

I remember reading back in the eighties that visitors to China were disconcerted because they were constantly being asked, "How old are you?" Apparently this was because the Chinese were trying to get some kind of handle on how non-Chinese were supposed to look.