It appears I haven't posted on my blog for a solid two weeks.  I'm sorry to all those dedicated readers who  (never bother their arse to comment) clicked on the bookmark only to have seen the same picture of a cup of tea.  The reason for my lack of posts was due to a week long holiday, an illness/hangover combo and an addiction to the British election coverage.  I feel like I've lost a bit of my edge for writing long rants so I thought I'd make a simple post with some pictures.  It's interesting if you haven't seen them but other foreigners tend to photograph these a lot so it's not the most original thing I've ever posted.  So here they are... Japan's "smoking manners" posters.

I've seen a number of these posters on ashtrays around train stations and the like.  I took these three  pictures at Tano train station but I was upset because my favourite one wasn't there.  It suggested that a "lit cigarette is at the same height as a child's face".  I'm not entirely sure what that one was suggesting really... always look out for children when you light up or you'll reduce their eyes to smouldering craters?  The other highlights included the declaration that smoke should have the same social stigma as farts.  The saddest tale went to the young boy who went to the beach in search of shells but only found cigarette butts.  The latter was accompanied with a sad looking child with a bucket and spade of course.  Indeed, they all continued the trend of only using English for the labels at the bottom of the poster.. BEACH, SHELLS, BUTTS!  Very dramatic altogether.

I quite like the posters because they are faintly amusing on their own but the English lines read rather strangely.  There are no major spelling or grammar mistakes but they don't have a very natural flow to them.  However, I've seen enough bad direct translations that I assume they've given a fairly decent attempt to get the points across.  In the end though the humour for a native English speak arises from this translation and thus leads to the numerous websites and blogs about it.  The thing I wonder about is why they translated them as there are so few foreigners here.  My only guess is that English was used because it is still viewed as sexy and cool when it comes to companies and adverts.

The interesting thing about this campaign is that none of the posters feature a message that suggests that you should give up smoking.  There is nothing that mentions how they are slowly eating away and destroying your insides.  Instead, it's all very light hearted suggestions that you shouldn't litter and that you should be careful about your second hand smoke.  Indeed, this is about as far as it goes for criticism of smoking in Japan.  Indeed, even this campaign is only aimed at shaming Japanese people who don't keep up an expected etiquette.  The idea of smoking being the problem is never brought into question and instead it is the individual who is blamed for their lack of responsibility.  A main reason (or you know... obvious reason) for this would be that they were commissioned by Japan Tobacco.  They are one of the largest tobacco companies in the world and own some foreign brands such as Camel and Benson and Hedges.  In Japan, some of their popular brands are called Peace and Hope.   By far the most surprising fact about them is that the Japanese Ministry of Finance owns a majority of shares in the company.  Indeed, until 1985 the tobacco industry in Japan was run by a state monopoly.  It's therefore no surprise to find that smoking is quite popular in Japan and there is a direct contrast with the recent implementation of smoking bans in other western countries.  I have therefore found myself living with the familiar smells of post-drinking smoke on my clothes after a few years of only smelling body odour in boozing establishments.

Urgh.  I'll be honest with you.  I was just going to post those pictures so I could do a quick blog post and then run away.  That's easier said than done though as I always start to expand these posts to encompass everything including the bloody history of the Japanese tobacco industry.  The basic point is that almost every middle-aged salaryman in Japan is a smoker.  Japan has one of the highest rates of smokers in the developed world and I believe it is the only one to have seen an increase.  I believe they have recently added warning labels on the packets but the same level of awareness is not visible as it is in other countries.  Even countries like Thailand sell packets with pictures of throat cancer and lung disease and it even put me off buying some cigars on holiday. I'm not really an anti-smoker myself and I don't like it when a government starts punishing people with an addiction by raising taxes on cigarettes to "help people quit".  However, the price of cigarettes in this country is exceptionally cheap compared to back home.  There is a standardised price of about 300 yen which is £2 or the equivalent of two bottles of coke out the vending machine.  Indeed, until recently anyone could buy a packet from a vending machine on the street.  Personally, I feel the degree of "coolness" that is attributed to smoking here is akin to the post-war world of America.  For example, I've seen comic books and anime with the main characters smoking, billboards with a seductive woman smoking and selling furniture and pretty much every generic Japanese actor smokes in the midst of his romanticised anguish.  I'm not exactly outraged myself but I'm just explaining how the attitude towards smoking in Japan hasn't changed in decades.  It's especially surprising that the tobacco companies have been state run and the price of a packet has hardly risen.  It's almost like they're trying to kill off their aging population so they won't have the pension crisis that everyone has feared.

I forgot to mention that Japanese cigarettes are also pretty weak.  A lot of Japanese women appear to smoke but they usually nurture a pack of peach flavoured lites for a week.  Indeed, the men appear to chain smoke during the day but I've witnessed many have a few puffs before throwing it in the ash tray (the adverts above are obsessed with people stubbing them out it seems).  That's not to say they aren't addicted but I often wonder how much of it is some sort of strange, Japanese... conformity.  It's almost like an adult version of Big Dave peer pressuring his mates into smoking behind the big sheds with him.  Also, I'm not saying this is the only reason as I reckon that cigarettes actually provide an important relief for stressed Japanese workers.  They do work themselves into the ground the poor buggers (even if they're just pretending to work hard sometimes) and I get the impression the bitter, black coffee and smoking break keeps them from snapping and killing everyone in their workplace.  Japanese stress:  Keeping the tobacco companies in business since the bubble burst.

Contradictorily to my opening paragraph, this last point is entirely of my own curiousity.  When I started studying Japanese I would drive along in my car and attempt to read shop signs and the like for practice.  I noticed that convenient stores would have the kanji for alcohol (酒) and a sign for tobacco.  The latter did not have a kanji so I expected it to be written in katakana (タバコ) as that is the alphabet used for foreign loan words.  However, the signs are written in hiragana （たばこ）which is used for Japanese words without kanji (amongst other things as grammar etc).  Therefore, I asked a lot of Japanese people why this was the case but it was apparently the first time they had noticed.  I think they just assumed that tobacco comes from Japan along with pasta, curry, televisions and cars.  So, why is tobacco written in hiragana?  I wrote that previous line to boost my search results.  The answer is that katakana was not used for foreign words until Japan opened up to the West in the middle of the 19th century. The words kept their pronunciation but were given an appropriate kanji.  Such an example is tempura (天ぷら) which is fried prawns that were introduced by the Portuguese.  However, the kanji for tobacco fell into disuse and because the word was so common in the Japanese language it maintained the use of hiragana instead of katakana.

Here is a link to the full collection of the smoking manner posters.  Enjoy.