depth, and use of the art.
In the late 1930s, when Japan was preparing for all-out war, the Japanese air force called in a face-reading expert to study the faces of new recruits and advise on whether they should be trained as pilots, mechanics, truck drivers, and so on.
This development was what led me to take an interest in face reading. In 1954, when I was editor of Preview magazine in Tokyo, I learned that the face reader who had been called in by the Japanese military was still alive and lived just outside the city.
With the help of a Japanese assistant, I managed to get an interview with him and did a story about his prewar experience.
This led to my doing more research on the subject at the National Diet Library, where I found a trove of treatises, old and new, on the subject.
Beginning around 1960, there was something of a face-reading renaissance in Japan, with more than a dozen scholarly works on the subject published over a period of about ten years.
Face readers, along with palm readers and other soothsayers, once again became common on city sidewalks in the evenings.
In the West, on the other hand, most people regard face reading as quackery, something best associated with fortune-tellers and Gypsies.
This attitude began to change during the last decades of the twentieth century. The publication of a number of English-language books on face reading (including my own), and the appearance of professional business consultants who introduced elements of face reading into their human resources advice, resulted in the skill being taken more seriously.
By the 1990s, mainstream business publications in the United States were reporting that a growing number of leading corporations had taken to calling in face readers to help them decide on new hires as well as on promotions to managerial and executive positions.
The appearance of the Internet has been a further boon to this ancient art, with dozens of sites promoting one version or another.
Most people today would still naturally question the validity of many face-reading claims, and rightly so, because some of the interpretations are simply too esoteric—and often too contradictory—to be accepted without question.
But there are many insights that are so obvious that no one can deny them. These “readings” are so much a part of our built-in psychology and our culture that they are, in fact, accepted without question.
One of the most obvious of these readings has to do with the size, shape, and color of the eyes. An infant, male or female, with big eyes is fussed over from day one and gets special treatment.
Eyes that are blue or green or streaked with gold (as are the eyes of some Vietnamese girls), get an even more dramatic reaction.
The lifelong influence that big, attractive eyes have on an individual is generally profound.
The size and shape of the lips is equally powerful. Not only do they reveal a great deal about an individual’s character, but they also dramatically influence the way other people behave toward that person.
Without question, the size and shape of the nose, the mouth, the teeth, and the ears tell a great deal about a person, and determine to a great extent how other people react to him or her.
The physiological and psychological foundations of face reading are as solid as physics, and knowing how to read facial and bodily features is one of the keys to developing and maintaining harmonious and effective human relationships.
As mentioned earlier, everybody reads faces, whether or not they have had any formal training. It is an automatic response. We do it without thinking. And we also react automatically in both positive and negative ways to the faces we see.
Going beyond one’s naturally programmed ability to read faces can give you not only extraordinary insight into what motivates and compels people, it can also dramatically increase your ability to use the knowledge in a more positive and satisfying way.
This book covers over one hundred specific facial characteristics, some of which, admittedly, are on the unusual side. The more esoteric readings are easy to recognize and even easier to discount, but they were discovered long ago and have stood the test of time.
Curiously enough, many of the specific face readings that originated in China, Japan, and Korea are related to love and romance, no doubt because in these countries face reading played such a vital role in choosing mates for so many generations.
On the more obvious level, face reading is a skill that can be learned easily and quickly by anyone, significantly enhancing the potential for one’s business and social success.
Boyé Lafayette de Mente
Tokyo, Japan
1
The ABCs of Face Reading
The Vital Power
Face reading is primarily based on the size, shape, position, quality, and color of certain facial features. Before one can read these “signs” with a maximum degree of accuracy, however, there are other factors that must be taken into consideration, the most important of which is the strength of the “vital power” of the person whose face is to be read.
Everyone is endowed with what might be called a “battery” that gives off a kind of “spark” or “light” that is reflected through the eyes, the face, and one’s manner. The strength of this power varies greatly between individuals. In some people it is very feeble, and as a result they have dull eyes, dull faces, and usually lead colorless lives. In others this light may shine with startling brilliance, and such people tend to lead lives that are extraordinary in some way.
The strength of a person’s “inner light” is not necessarily connected with the type of face he or she has. A person with a very “attractive” face may be low-powered, and a person whose facial features are undesirable may be a regular dynamo. And there are certain facial characteristics indicating a very low order of intelligence and imagination that are seldom accompanied by a strong life force.
Furthermore, this inner power, whatever its strength, works in different ways. One man with a powerful “battery” may become a great religious leader, while another man with the same amount of power may be a master criminal, a salesman, a writer, or a revolutionary.
A face reader can only estimate the strength of someone’s vital power and its overall influence, but once he has also scrutinized the individual’s facial features and body build, he can determine it more accurately.
The Body Build
Along with this inner light, the face reader must also take note of the person’s body build. Most people fit into one of three broad categories: slender, stocky and muscular, or fat.
And people in each of these categories share many common characteristics. Slender men tend to be sensitive, intellectually active, emotional, have well-developed imaginative and creative powers, have love affairs with women older than themselves, and may be dominated by strong-willed women. Men of this type often do not fare well in business or politics—occupations that require physical endurance and mental toughness.
Slender women with oval-shaped faces tend to have quick minds and be skillful at
