Bond market going wild. Will be interesting to see impact of housing market with 7% rates and AI uncertainty. Was speaking to a real estate agent friend a week ago and she was feeling winds of change and rushing to get clients to list as soon as possible.
Was in both China and Japan recently and counted one person in China out of the thousands of Asian men I saw that had any sort of facial hair. Zero in Japan.
You look at paintings of emperors in China across several dynasties and they all had mustaches, goatees, a few with a full on beard. Same with the Meiji Emperor. Romance of Three Kingdoms all portray the protagonists with facial hair, in particular Zhang Fei and Guan Yu. So the underlying culture does not seem to be antagonistic to facial hair. There are even many Chinese characters for different types of beards. Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek both had mustaches.
So why did facial hair completely die out in modern times for China and Japan? I know some Asian men have trouble growing a lot of facial hair, but the Chinese are a varied bunch and I know there are probably tens to hundreds of millions who can. Do Chinese and Japanese women just not like them?
Check out Zhou Enlai’s beard in his younger days:
https://images-cdn.bridgemanimages.com/api/1.0/image/600wm.XXX.66717110.7055475/1168587.jpg
