Abstract
Principal Component Analysis has been applied to 64 anthropological measurements of 700 adult Japanese males aged 20 to 59. As a result five factors were extracted and characterized. Then individual principal component values for each factor were calculated, and their changes with age were examined in order to survey the variations of synthetic body size and shape with age.
The main results are as follows :
1) The first principal component could be regarded as a total body size factor, the second as a lean-obesity factor, the third as a shoulder width factor, and the fourth as a trunk height and limb length factor.
2) The total body size became the largest in the 30-34 years. There was a strict tendency to corpulence with age. The shoulder width decreased between the 30-34 years and the 40-44 years. The trunk height had a tendency to decrease with age, whereas the relative upper limb length had a slight tendency to increase.
