I heard from a Japanese person that Japanese people have a lower body temperature than caucasians. Is this the case?
Examples from the internet of people discussing claims that Japanese people, or asians in general, have a lower body temperature
My Japanese girlfriend tells me that Asians have a lower body temperature than honkies.
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I dont have a link, but it is common knowledge in Japan, that we Japanese have a slightly lower body temperature than other ethnic groups. Instead of 98.6, ours is about 98.
Japanese people have lower body temperatures
A lady ... set forth this assertion ... and was upset I refused to believe it.
... [on the next page] There was a Discovery Channel special on surviving in cold places and how some people adapt. They put a caucasian army officer and an inuit hunter the same age into a -20 meat locker wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. They had them wired up to check their vitals. The Inuit's body temp. dropped, but in small, steady amounts over a 30min period. The army dude on the other hand was near-hypothermic by the end.
I have no doubt that certain people's heritages, based on environment can have certain advantages/disadvantages over the other. That's only natural. But for someone to suggest that Japanese, rather than mongoloid are X or Y is cultural jingoism bubbling to the surface (not limited to Japan, of course).
As far as I can tell, the putative explanation is that some (but not all) people in Japan are ethnically different from some (but not all) people living in countries in Europe, North America, or Australia, and that those ethnic differences may be associated with different average body temperature.
While I'm primarily interested in Japanese people, any answer with a reliable source that says different ethnic groups have different body temperatures will be welcome. If you're of the opinion that different ethnic groups do not exist, then this claim may be a little hard to negate, but a study showing no differences between body temperature of people who live in Japan and people who live in a country perceived as predominantly caucasian would go a long way to debunking this myth.