Am J Psychiatry 1990; 147:330-335
Copyright © 1990 by American Psychiatric Association
Transethnic adoption and personality traits: a lesson from Japanese orphans returned from China to Japan
WS Tseng, K Ebata, M Miguchi, M Egawa and DG McLaughlin
Department of Psychiatry, University of Hawaii School of Medicine, Honolulu 96813.
The authors interviewed 25 Japanese who had been left as orphans in China
at the end of World War II and who had recently returned to Japan with
their Chinese spouses after almost four decades. It was found that even
though they had been raised as Chinese culturally for almost their entire
lives, most of these subjects had retained certain Japanese personality
traits and social behavior from early childhood, and these characteristics
distinguished them from their Chinese counterparts.
