From Newsgroup: talk.origins

I was just scanning some really old family photos from the 1940's. We
had more relatives in Hiroshima before the war, and some survived. I
came across a portrait of a family of (I think) cousins of my
grandfather, and a couple of them have oval iris like anime characters
like Sailor Moon and Astro Boy. None of them are wearing glasses so it doesn't seem to to affect their vision. I'd never seen this type of
iris before except in Anime characters.

I looked up oval iris on the web and only got defective development and blindness issues where the iris sometimes is missing some tissue and it
causes the pupils and iris into a mishapen oval. This did not look like
that and affected both eyes.

You have to wonder where that odd oval shape came from that became
popular in Japanese animated characters. The photo is of high
resolution and looks like it was taken and printed by a professional.
The iris really does look oval. The only thing that I can think of is
that because the focus is sharp and all the facial features are clearly defined that they may have had some weird eye issue where the eye might
be rapidly moving from side to side so that it looks like the pupil is
in the center of an oval iris. Just some weird human phenotype.

Ron Okimoto

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