Average Height in Japan (Men & Women)

How tall Japanese adults are

Japanese men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 170.8 cm (5′7″), and Japanese women 158.3 cm (5′2″). These are estimates from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which in 2016 pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries.

Japanese men rank 102nd of 200 countries and Japanese women 113th, almost exactly in the middle of the world table. The global median for that cohort is about 171 cm for men and 159 cm for women. The difference between Japanese men and women is 12.5 cm.

The site's 170 cm page is almost exactly the average Japanese man, and the 5′2″ page the average Japanese woman.

Why birth year matters so much in Japan

NCD-RisC estimates the adult height of each birth cohort, the people born in a given year, at age 18. In Japan the distinction between cohorts is unusually important. As shown below, Japanese born in the 1890s and in the 1990s differ by about 15 cm. Averaging all Japanese adults together would blend very different generations.

Japan also has some of the oldest measurement data anywhere. NCD-RisC left out the 1860–1895 cohorts because only six countries had data for people born that early, and Japan was one of them, along with American Samoa, India, Norway, Switzerland and the United States. The paper also lists Japan, alongside Europe and the US, as one of the places where men's height trends have been reconstructed for up to 250 years from conscript and other records.

A century of dramatic change

Japanese men gained 14.6 cm and women 16.0 cm over the century, among the largest gains anywhere. NCD-RisC singles out Japan as one of the places with especially large gains, along with South Korea, Iran, Greenland and parts of Southern and Central Europe. The fastest period was between the 1926 and 1956 cohorts, when men added 7.4 cm and women 6.6 cm in 30 years.

Then the rise stopped. NCD-RisC states that Japan's "impressive rise in height" ended for people born after the early 1960s. In the data, men peaked at 171.4 cm in the 1976 cohort and women at 158.5 cm. The 1996 cohort is fractionally shorter for both. In 1896, Japanese women were among the shortest women in the world. NCD-RisC lists Japan, with El Salvador, Peru, Bangladesh and South Korea, as having the next shortest women after Guatemala.

Height without weight gain

NCD-RisC points out one unusual feature of Japan's rise: it came with little increase in body-mass index. Japan, Singapore and France had larger-than-median height gains with little change in BMI, the authors note. The United States and Kiribati gained less height than the global median but much more BMI. The authors also suggest that these height gains may partly explain why women in Japan and South Korea have the first and fourth highest life expectancies in the world.

Japan's school health records

Japan has an extraordinary long-running source of measured height: the School Health Statistics Survey of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). According to Nippon.com's summary of the fiscal 2024 results, MEXT has annual records of schoolchildren's average height and weight since 1900, except for 1940 to 1947.

Between 1926 and 2024, 17-year-old boys grew 10.2 cm taller and girls 7.7 cm. The 1948 figure is a reminder of the war's toll. The first postwar measurements found boys 1.9 cm shorter and 2.2 kg lighter than in 1939. Nippon.com reports that postwar gains in height and weight continued until about 1995, with no significant change in the three decades since. The 2024 average for boys, 170.8 cm, is identical to NCD-RisC's estimate for adult men born in 1996.

Reading the school data carefully

Hiroshi Mori, a professor emeritus at Senshu University who has studied Japan's height statistics in detail, cautions that older school figures need careful interpretation. Before 1945, most young men took a conscription physical exam at age 20, but those statistics were available only to privileged institutions. School surveys covered students, and in the 1920s and 1930s only a small, better-off minority of teenagers continued to higher education. Mori estimates that this was about 5–6% of teenage boys in the 1930s, so prewar figures for older students are biased upward. College students were dropped from the school surveys from 1972, leaving a very stable series covering ages 6 to 17.

The National Health and Nutrition Survey

Japan's second key source is the National Health and Nutrition Survey of the Ministry of Health (originally the Ministry of Health and Welfare). Mori explains that it began in 1946 on the order of the Occupation authorities, to understand near-starvation conditions, particularly in cities. In its early years it ran twice a year and published height and weight by age from infancy to the 70s.

Because it measures adults, the survey shows how much each generation outgrew its parents:

• In 1949, men in their 30s measured 161.0 cm in urban areas and 159.9 cm in rural areas.
• Around 1950, late teens were about 159 cm, no taller than their fathers.
• From the 1970s to 1990, sons in their late teens were about 6 cm taller than their fathers.
• By the late 2010s, sons were no taller than their fathers at all.

Mori also uses adult survey data to look back before 1948. Because men keep roughly the same height from about 20 into their early 50s, the heights of older adults measured after the war reveal how tall their generation was in the 1930s. He concludes that Japanese men in their 20s in the mid-1930s were close to 160 cm. He also notes that Japanese children's height plateaued around the end of the 1980s despite continued increases in consumption of animal products.

Comparing the two surveys

Putting the school and health surveys side by side is revealing. Mori compares high school seniors in the school survey with people of the same age in the nutrition survey. In 1950 the seniors averaged 161.7 cm, 2.7 cm taller than the 159.0 cm the nutrition survey found for that age group. The gap shrank to 1.8 cm by 1960 and to almost nothing by 1980 and 2000, turning slightly negative by 2015. That fits Mori's point about upward bias: the more representative the student population became, the less it differed from the general population.

The adult figures settle on about 171 cm for men born in the 1960s and 1970s. The nutrition survey measured men aged 26–29 at 167.24 cm in 1980, men aged 25–29 at 171.3 cm in 1995, and men in their 30s at 171.0 cm and 171.6 cm in 2000 and 2005. Mori concludes that these cohorts reached about 171 cm in young adulthood. That matches NCD-RisC's 171.4 cm for men born in 1976.

Growing earlier, not longer

One subtle change concerns when Japanese teenagers finish growing. Mori notes that boys born in 1945 still grew 1.6 cm between ages 16 and 17, while boys born in 2000 grew only 0.8 cm over the same year. He also estimates that teenagers in the nutrition survey gained roughly another centimeter between 17 and 20, with some statistical error. Modern Japanese adolescents reach adult height earlier than their grandparents did, even though their final height is similar to their parents'. That is one reason the MEXT figure for 17-year-olds now matches the adult average so closely.

Height in Japanese history

Japan's skeletal record suggests a long period without much change before the modern rise. Our World in Data summarizes estimated average heights of about 161 cm for 300 BC–AD 250, 159 cm for the medieval period (1200–1600) and 158 cm for the Edo period (1603–1867). These are averages from skeletons, which come with considerable measurement uncertainty, but they suggest that people in the Edo period were, if anything, slightly shorter than people two thousand years earlier. The jump to over 170 cm for men in the late 20th century had no precedent in that history.

Japan and its East Asian neighbors

Japan was once the tallest of these countries for cohorts born in the mid-20th century. It is now behind South Korea, Taiwan and China. NCD-RisC explains why. Japan's rise stopped in cohorts born after the early 1960s, South Korea's continued until the 1980s cohorts for men, and growth is still continuing in China. As a result, the paper notes, South Koreans are now taller than Japanese, and Chinese men and women have also passed their Japanese counterparts. Mori reports the same overtaking in children: South Korean children caught up with Japanese peers in the mid-1990s and were about 3 cm taller by the mid-2000s.

The full ranking is on the average height by country hub.

Everyday heights in Japan

For Japanese readers, the benchmarks are about 171 cm for men and 158 cm for women born since the 1970s. A man of 178 cm (5′10″) is clearly tall in Japan but average in the Netherlands, and a woman of 165 cm stands out in Japan more than she would in Europe. To see where a particular height falls, the height percentile calculator compares it with reference data.

Japan's story is less about being short or tall than about speed and then stillness: one of the fastest height increases in the world in the mid-20th century, followed by three decades of no change at all.