Are The Japanese Smarter Than The Americans?

In October 1986, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Prime Minister of Japan, offered an explanation of why Japan competes so well against the United States: the Japanese people score higher on IQ tests than Americans.

Here are some reasons why –

1) Japanese children attend school for an average of 240 days a year; American children attend school for less than 180 days a year.

2) The quality of education is uniformly high in Japan. Most Japanese are of the same social class, and about 99 percent are of the same ethnic group.

3) Discipline and expectations of students in Japan are much higher than in the United States.

4) Japanese students are assigned heavier course loads and more homework than their American counterparts.

5) Economic success in Japan is absolutely dependent on academic achievement. Although academic achievement increases the chances of economic success in the United States, it is not absolutely essential.

It is therefore no wonder that mean IQ scores are higher in Japan than in the United States. The Japanese place a greater value on education. As a result, Japanese children take educational goals more seriously and spend more time in school and on homework than American children.

Even though the American IQ is not as high as that of the Japanese, Americans are responsible for innovating more of this century’s new technologies than any other nationality, and they have won more Nobel Prizes than the members of any other culture. IQ scores do not test such things as creativity.
American society emphasizes creativity.

(Quoted from “Are the Japanese, On The Average, Smarter Than Americans?”, Physical Anthropology-Sixth Edition by Philip L. Stein and Bruce M. Rowe)

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