Japans new old craze

The Japanese believe a person's blood type foretells a lot about his personality, and Japan is having a "blood type boom" right now, with variety shows on TV that report on what characteristics each blood type group share. In one recent show, they placed hidden cameras and watched a group of people eating all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue, in which you cook your food together on a big grill in the center of the table. A type people tend to be organized and neat, and the A types took just enough food and cooked it in a small corner of the grill. Type B people, who are "going my way" (a word the Japanese use for anyone who is in their own little world, like me), took too much food and hoarded it from everyone else. AB types, known for doing things differently from others, chose things like vegetables when everyone else was eating meat.

In another experiment, they showed the last episode of one of the most moving anime shows of all time, A Dog of Flanders, based on a famous Belgian children's story, to rooms full of people separated by blood type. In the last minutes of the show, as young Mello goes into the St. James's Church to see the three famous Rubens aintings uncovered, allowing him to gaze at them for the first time, he finally knows happiness. As angels come to take him and his faithful dog Patrache up to heaven, the camera cuts back to the roomful of people who were watching the scene. 7 out of 8 of the type O people were bawling over the touching scene, while only 2 out of 8 of the type A and type AB people were in tears.

For most of my life I didn't know my own blood type, something which is unthinkable in Japan, where the address book functions on cell phones have a place to record the blood type of the people you're calling.

p.s. I'm O and u?

Via The most excellent J-list ;-)
For a more indepth description of the various characteristics possessed by each bloodtype you can browse on by here (note! better highlight the text to be able to read it, light pink on white doesn't make for easy reading)