Are Asian cultures the same?

27 Dec, 2006 in Asia, Chinese culture by Fili

Are Asian cultures the same?

How different are the Asian cultures? can people really tell them apart? It was always a bit hard for me to pinpoint the differences between Asian cultures, being the ignorant westerner that I am, and with the Asian globalization and the mixing process of the Asian cultures it’s becoming even more difficult to tell the different country styles apart. In Taiwan, strong Chinese, Korean and Japanese influences were apparent in both fashion, architecture and food, and from what I’ve seen at the big cities in other Asian countries this Asian multi-culture blend is very common.

In "The meaning of being Asian", a surprisingly popular post, I summarized with "You can’t tell them apart not because they’re all the same, but because they’re all unique", yet the discussion about the differences between cultures - Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese - is fascinating.

Thanks to Mei11’s post in the Israeli China culture and language forum in Tapuz, I got word that the All-look-same website has expanded its famous Faces test to a more comprehensive exam room that allow anyone to test just how good they are in differentiating between the Chinese, the Japanese and the Korean culture in food, architecture and general scenery.

Vanina, who’s Taiwanese, and I, a westerner, sat down together to do most of the tests and as you can see down below, we didn’t do very well, or atleast not as well as we expected we’ll do. Bottom line for both of us was that it was very confusing, almost impossible. Here are a few more responses to the exams from Israelis who either live in China or are very involved with Chinese culture, responding to Mei11’s post :

"Those exams gave me a headache, but I still did them all. They really confused me." (YaelIsam)

"I also couldn’t recognize anything, there’s no way of telling" (Omiz)

"It’s been a while since I failed a test, so it’s nice to have this opportunity. In faces, I’m quite convinced there are no real differences. Even Asians can’t tell the difference, even if they say they do" (renjintso)

"Yeah, same here" (happydog23)

"I used to be able to tell them apart by their clothes, since they have different tastes in fashion, but it’s becoming more and more similar.." (Mei11)

Here are the tests and the scores that I got. Let me know how you did…

Faces