Average Faces of the World

It seems to be very difficult for people to tell the nationality of a person just by looks unless they are from the same country or places around that country. I never thought of this fact when I was in Japan, so I clearly remember the day when one of my American friends asked me if I could tell the difference between Japanese people and Chinese people. I said yes, but he doubted me and took me to a computer lab to take an online quiz where I was asked to tell whether a photo of the face shown on screen was Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. I was about 90% of the time correct, and he was really surprised. I was surprised in a different way, too.

When I traveled to Heidelberg in Germany, there were many Chinese tourists. Among those people in the distance, I saw a family who looked Japanese to me. Just out of curiosity, I went closer to hear what language they spoke, and my assumption was confirmed. The funny thing was that they started talking to me to ask "Do you know what this building is" in Japanese without even asking if I was Japanese.

Then, I was not quite sure about the answer so I decided to ask the people around us. The white person to whom I first talked did not speak any English. The second person I talked to was German and did not speak English very well. And finally, I found a person from the US. Then, I suddenly realized the fact that I couldn't tell differences of European people at all, and understood why my American friend could not tell the difference of Asian people :P

Today, I found a pretty interesting article that shows "Average Faces of Women of the World".  I could immediately tell which one is Japanese and some other Asian people, but I completely failed all the others. Maybe this would be a good set of pictures to memorize to give a useful clue when I meet people from all over the world :)