The COMT Gene of the Japanese Is Val-Dominant｜Warrior and Worrier as a Western Yardstick

This week brings the final installment. I will focus on a single gene, COMT (catechol-O-methyltransferase), and, weaving in a good deal of my own imagination, approach an intriguing picture of the Japanese people.

Let me begin with an overview of the COMT variants by population, as research has accumulated them so far.

[Population, Val/Val | Val/Met | Met/Met]
● Europe, about 23% | about 50% | about 27%
● Middle East, about 25% | about 50% | about 26%
● Ashkenazi Jews, about 29% | about 50% | about 21%
● South Asia, about 31% | about 50% | about 20%
● Latin America and admixed Americans, about 35% | about 48% | about 17%
● People of African descent, about 49% | about 42% | about 9%
● East Asia, about 51% | about 41% | about 8%
● Japan, about 46% | about 44% | about 10%

These figures are only a rough reference for now, but the differences between populations are plain to see.

In other words, the fragmentary data available so far says that, as far as COMT is concerned, there is no “human standard.” The most one can say is that the intermediate type makes up close to half in every region. East Asia and Africa in particular, with their vast populations, live in a Val-dominant world where Met is quite rare. Europe, the Middle East, and Jewish populations, by contrast, show no overwhelming predominance of either type.

Interestingly, the ancestral type, which we share with chimpanzees, is Val, and Met is thought to be a derived type that arose partway through human history. From here on, this is my personal hypothesis, so please take it with a grain of salt.

I suspect the emergence of the Met variant is connected to the period, some time after the Out of Africa migration, when farming and settled life arose in the Middle East. The variant may have been triggered, for example, by the stress carried by groups living across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, where wars over land followed one after another.

The East Asian peoples, Japan included, have kept the old type. In their deepest layer are ancestors who kept moving single-mindedly eastward while most of the ancestral population stayed behind in the Middle East and the Mediterranean and waged war. That may be how they were able to hold on to the old gene.

One could speak of a Middle Eastern and Western European type that mutated in hostility toward other “humans,” and an East Asian and African type that kept advancing through “nature.” So when the West calls COMT’s Val the “warrior gene” and Met the “worrier gene,” it is looking at the wrong place. That reading is a fantasy that holds only at the level of their own populations.

In the wars of the Middle East and Western Europe, those peoples might literally have died out had they not produced Met. As I wrote last time, Val is extremely strong under stress, decisive, and restlessly active, while Met is weak under stress but good at facing a single matter in a quiet place.

Consider what is standard for Homo sapiens. This is a species that was never built for farming and settlement, so had it entered that way of life while keeping Val, it risked wiping itself out through fighting among its own kind before anyone noticed. That extreme stress may have acted on the instincts of the species and brought about the mutation. If so, Met is a special case.

The opposite view is also possible, however. The mutation may have been needed to devise tactics for seizing as much land and food as possible from the “enemy,” meaning fellow humans. To put it bluntly, it could be called the gene of cunning.

So, while humans in the Middle East and Western Europe went on fighting one another, perhaps the earliest ancestors of the Japanese were those who stepped half a pace back from the groups that stayed put and kept up their foolish quarrels, gave up on them, and kept moving east in search of the “land of origin” where the sun rises.

Of course, this is nothing more than a fantasy in my head. But an important truth sometimes hides inside a possibility that seems absurd. Possibilities that surfaced intuitively from the fieldwork of prewar pioneers in archaeology, folklore, and anthropology have, in fact, turned out to match what we now know to a surprising degree. The real problem lies elsewhere, in what follows.

Until now, and in fact still today, the “(human) standard” that circulates in the world has been built from the Western European type of “human.” That must be called a problem. A peculiar yardstick, one that departs from humanity’s very origins, is passing around wearing the face of the universal, and we cannot let that go.

By that yardstick, groups that strongly share the ancestral type (Val) become, in their eyes, “barbarians” who are not fully human. This is the logic of colonialism. The bizarre, fabricated question of who counts as “human” can surface without limit from a single gene. Over the next twenty years, as genetic testing and analysis become truly democratized, we need to understand this risk early.

In fact, there was a time in the West when the Met type, which is common among white people, was called the “smart gene,” the gene of the human being. People no longer say so openly, but the West still firmly holds this view. For them, cutting-edge genetic analysis is bound up with a very strong white ideology, and there is a wish to use it as scientific proof that “we are not the barbarians.”

Unfortunately for the West, it cannot lead in this field. Its greatest obstacle is Christianity. Because strong pressure and restrictions from Christianity are unavoidable there, the stage of cutting-edge genetic research has already shifted to the non-Christian world, to China and India.

Over three installments, I have focused on just one gene, COMT, to give you a tangible sense of what genes are, and I have shared my own imaginings along the way. Let me end with a further flight of fancy.

Around the world, the Japanese carry a common label. They are said to live in village societies with heavy pressure to conform, to lack decisiveness, to be poor at creating something from nothing, and to resist change. But is that really true?

Speaking only of COMT, the Val/Val type is extremely strong in stressful environments and decisive, poor at concentrating on one thing, but full of curiosity and restless energy. I have come to think that what may be holding back the abilities of the Japanese is the “completed society,” a social structure that took Western Europe as its model. When this heavy restriction is stripped away, I believe a moment will come again when most Japanese bring this genetic trait into full play.

Look back over just two centuries or so. When forced resets came, with the Meiji Restoration, the Great Kanto Earthquake, and the burnt-out ruins of defeat, the regenerative power of the Japanese was without equal. Isn’t the machinery of modern bureaucratic regulation, then, the biggest factor weakening the strength of the Japanese?

On top of that, poor food and poor surroundings have completely suppressed the strength that many Japanese were born with. However good your genes may be, if their expression is held down by environmental factors acquired later in life, that is the end of it. You may have something good, and the environment will not let you use it. This may be the essential problem of Japan. A vast number of Japanese are probably doing things in life that do not suit them. That is why breakdowns keep piling up, people fall ill, the quality of life declines, and the country has lost both its momentum and its strength.

Seen this way, the only thing we need is a forced reset. Realistically, the trigger will be the earthquake directly beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area or the Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake, one of which is all but certain to strike within thirty years. At that moment, the “vested interests of Japan” built up by the Choshu clique, the colonialists, and academia will collapse, and along with the burnt-out ruins, open space will be born.

In that moment, the environment in which the Japanese can best display their abilities will be in place, and the abilities each person has had suppressed until now are likely to be honed. I will deliberately add, however, that there is an important precondition.

Until “the time that is to come” arrives, we must put our diet in order, become healthy, set our surroundings right, look inward, and devote ourselves to whatever we can do for the next Japan and the next Japanese, or for the world and for humanity. If this precondition is not met by then, even good genes will mean nothing.

Genes are not destiny. Yet the more I have set my own genes against the course of my life, the sharper the picture has become, until I can see plainly that, while trying to live in keeping with my genes, I had strayed from the path. The cause of that straying is society. The number of Japanese who suffer here and cannot bring out their abilities must be considerable.

When everything has been reset, within “the group called the Japanese,” the Val/Val types will be the first to open up paths, one after another. They soon get bored, however, and their interest moves on to something else, so they leave things unfinished, simply because they have lost interest. The Met/Met types keep their eyes on the truth and continue their inquiry, but unless they can make a quiet, stress-free environment for themselves, they cannot bring out their strength and are crushed. The cautious Val/Met types then take hold of the elements released along the way, use their dexterity to mix and arrange them skillfully, and present the result.

When the Val/Val types run out of dopamine, their driving force, they grow listless and decline. The Met/Met types come into their own as society gradually stabilizes, but their distance from the pressure to conform proves decisive. The Val/Met types are the parent group that produces social pressure, so once their hold grows firm, they begin to hammer down the nail that sticks out and to treat those who think quietly as if they did not exist.

Their dexterous caution becomes their undoing. Gradually and surely, they keep putting regulations in place to preserve harmony, and they finish things off so that nothing changes. In that sense, unlike Shoin Yoshida and Shinsaku Takasugi, Hirobumi Ito and Aritomo Yamagata may have been the typical case.

Right after the defeat, citizens, police, and politicians were protected by the yakuza. Once society began to stabilize, they suddenly branded the yakuza a social evil and a threat to order, and crushed them with regulation and force. That history traces exactly this pattern. Now that the yakuza have vanished from local communities, crimes by foreigners who have moved into the vacuum occur every day.

Through my research in Nishinari, Osaka, I have come to think that the yakuza essentially stood in the position of the kunitsukami. I suspect that this kind of history, too, changes greatly depending on a people’s distribution of genes and on whether they are able to bring out their abilities.

And finally, everyone is different. The meaning of those words is probably a truth that only sinks in after one has faced oneself through genetic testing.