Am asian myself, got 6/18 too.

CJK people actually do look very similar anyway, which is not surprising as there are a lot of shared genetics.

The way people tell them apart is going to be mostly based on current popular fashion, which is quite difficult to do with these bust shots and what I'm guessing are older pictures

Twenty five years ago, I lived in San Francisco. This website was "talk of the town" for a quick minute. The real trick is looking at people's hair styles. In my experience, fashion indicates one's ethnicity/nationality much more than face shape alone. Think about a blond Italian from northern Italy, vs a blond German from southern Germany. They will have wildly different fashion styles (clothes and hair). The same for a Londoner and a Parisian.

11/18 :)

What’s really wild to me is having spent time in both Mexico and Thailand, I have seen some people in Mexico that could have a twin in Thailand. That was really unexpected.

I got 12/18 on faces as an American-born Caucasian living in Japan for over 10 years. Since the subjects were photographed in New York City (and from the other comments, at least a decade ago), cues from fashion and makeup only helped me get about 4 of them, another 6 had pretty strong ethnic features. Of the remaining 8, it was a bit of a tossup and I did worse than guessing, getting only 2 correct.

13/18 on food. Even with a lot of the same general types of food, the presentation and specific ingredients made a lot of them somewhat simple. I got tripped up on a few, though, where I overthought it ("a Japanese X is usually not like this") or ones where it was really a tossup for me between Chinese and Korean since I'm less familiar with those foods.

As some other posters have said, it’s the “accessories” that often give you a clue. Clothes, makeup, hairstyle, etc.

Also, Asians in their native countries are more distinctive vs. say, fully “Americanized” Asian Americans who I feel are a separate category that is more homogenous with each other than their country or ethnicity.

Another point I’ve observed more recently is that Korea and some parts of the Sinosphere are converging in aesthetics. Japan still seems to be doing its own thing. Though culturally I’d say Japan and Korea nonetheless share the most similarities.

I got 6/18 for the faces ("Obviously, very bad.") I thought I would get at least 50%. Interestingly, of the ones I felt very sure about, I did much better (got about 4 out of those 6).

    > officially recognizes 55 ethnicities

It's too slow. It takes at least five seconds to load the next picture after you answer. You should probably just preload all the pictures client-side. I wasn't able to get through it.

Is this still around? I think this site was from 20 years ago.

Domain created 2001-07-18

I'm Asian, grew up in Vietnam, got 8/18. Without the specific hair styles, I can see all of them being Vietnamese

1/18 must be some new low. Inverse genius it told me.

15/18 on food. Been to and eaten at all three countries. It was mostly instinct TBH. I’m not sure I can point out exactly what characteristics make a particular picture of food Korean/Chinese/Japanese.

That said I really love food. I cook all 3 types often and go out to eat all 3 types (and even regional variants) quite frequently.

I got a bit more than average correct, but they all looked like New Yorkers from the early 2000s to me if I'm honest. Maybe it's because I'm watching Castle right now, or it is indeed because fashion and stylistic choices tell a lot more about when and where someone is from.

I got 3/18. I'm not sure what to think of that. I live in a city full of Asian people, international students, tourists etc etc. One of my best friends in high school was Korean. One of my closest friends at uni was Japanese. One of my close friends now is Chinese.

Is it good or bad? I don't know.

The thing is the asians are dressed / made up in a confusing way. Koreans don't on the street don't typically look like that, whereas say a Japanese person might.

It would be a better test if it were from the collarbone-up, no clothes or makeup.

13/18 Maybe growing up in NZ and hanging out a bit with people from different cultures helps.

The architectural version is interesting to me. There's really a world of difference, but you need to know some history and some of the "cultural vibes" particular to each country to understand.

Very uncultured and untraveled caucasian here. I got 10/18, surprising myself. Probably plenty of luck, but at least 5 or 6 I was quite confident about. Not sure how.

It looks site is down.

I played this quite a few years ago and felt pretty certain that they deliberately chose photos that were atypical of each ethnicity. That said, there kind of is no typical Chinese look since it's such a huge country. Those in the north are taller and have similarities to Koreans, those in the south will have more similarities to Vietnamese.

Some of the tests feel like they're trying to trick you. How would you ever know with the nori roll if you weren't there?

You forgot to add North East Indians to this list

"Out of 18, you scored 9". I am considered "normal". Best compliment of the day.

Now do England, Ireland, Germany, France :)

13/18 Moon Lee’s pics. This is too easy.

Admitting this kind of conflicts with the One China Policy and the implicit Han Supremacist attitude prevalent in CCP politics but China is ethnically diverse compared to Korea and Japan simply due to its geographic scale. There might be a certain Han "look" but I'd expect "Chinese" to be much more difficult to pin down even if you ignore the absurdity of trying to pin down "pure" ethnicities across an entire continent.

Delineating Korean and Japanese "looks" already seems a fool's errand if you consider that archeological evidence demonstrates close cultural and trade relationships (or alternatively: astronomically unlikely astonishing examples of parallel developments) between the two regions dating back at least to the Neolithic period - and that the current "native" population seems to only date back no farther than that period despite archeological evidence of prior populations.

Of course this all also exists in the context of Chinese history which largely hinges on what exactly you want to call "China" historically as for most of its written history there really wasn't a single unified entity.

We tend to project backwards a notion of nationhood that in the West largely only came about in the 19th century. In Europe, as a German, I find my own country to be such an obvious example to this as people from all nooks of the political spectrum will find ways to try and shoehorn the modern federal republic into an unbroken chain of history starting with the "Germanic" tribes valiantly resisting Roman rule.

In my country's specific case, the origin myth is completely nonsensical if you look at the actual historic record. The shared identity of the various tribes settling the region only existed from the outside perspective of Rome which simply referred to all foreign territories as being settled "barbarians" (because that's what the foreign languages sounded like to Romans - to put that in perspective, imagine we unironically called Asians "chingchongs").

The first entity with the word "German" in its name was the Holy Roman Empire but the words "of Germany" were only added centuries later and for the longest time the mythological warrior Hermann who "repelled" the Roman invaders by "uniting the tribes" was seen as a villain because - true to its name - the Holy Roman Empire saw itself as the successor to the Roman Empire. It literally included parts of Italy after all and was preceded by the Carolingian Empire (covering much of the same territory but more of modern France). And of course more recently we've learned that the tribes were actually more divided than unified following the conflict with Rome and that the role of Hermann may have been heavily overstated due to the fact that he was a Roman soldier and thus provided a good basis for a grandiose narrative.

You could point at the Kingdom of Germany as a historical root of German identity but there was no shared cultural identity during that period and certainly no awareness of it among its population. The common folk for most of the middle ages would have most likely only been aware of their local ruler or clergy with a faint awareness of the overarching power structures but migration through trade not withstanding separations were often as strong between neighboring villages as between modern countries.

The closest thing we get to an idea of a "German national identity" is following the conquest by Napoleon and the rise of an aristocratic/mercantile republic monarchy which provided the democratic roots for the modern republic - but even in WW1 "German" culture was heavily defined by Prussia (which covered most of German territory). Historically therefore it seems less like German nationalism was the politicalization of a shared ethnic, cultural and political identity but rather provided a framework to fabricate such an identity in its absence. Even if you ignore the absurdity of claiming a unified "German" cultural identity, the now popular notion of there being such a thing as a "German" ethnic identity flies in the face of there still being distinct native but "non-German" ethnic populations in parts of Germany despite centuries of Germanization and assimilation (notably Danish Germans in the North and Sorbs in the East).

Much like trying to draw the line where you "enter the atmosphere" of the Earth, borders are ultimately arbitrary delineations no matter how you define them and populations will move around, mix and change over time. The abstractions they help us create are likewise arbitrary and have more to do with assertions of power and control than any grander mythology used to justify them.