Blowing smoke... the other way, if you please

As it nears the end of August, I am getting ready to celebrate an important milestone: the one-year anniversary of my coming to Japan. The past eleven-and-a-half months have been filled with all sorts of new experiences and unexpected misunderstandings – some of which I’ve already related in this column – and with any luck, things will continue on apace. But in spite of that, there are still some things that I really haven’t gotten used to here, and one of the big ones that really, really bugs me is the smoking.

Now, I don’t mean any disrespect to those of you out there who are part of “the habit”: after all, I have had many friends and relatives over the years who are or have been smokers. Even my own father, a doctor of all people, did so at one point. In spite of this, I have never understood the appeal of inhaling fumes containing many different chemicals that would be lethal on their own, in amounts just small enough to let you die of long-term health problems, like cancer and emphysema, instead. And then there’s the smoke itself. I can still vividly remember coming home from my summer job as a bus boy in a smoke-filled restaurant years ago, and hacking up soot. In those days, I kind of felt like my job and coal-mining had a lot in common, at least in terms of the health risks. (I had that wrong, though: actually, tobacco smoke is much deadlier in terms of actual deaths caused worldwide per year.)

These days, of course, a lot of that has changed: an increasingly health-conscious America has put ever-tighter restrictions on tobacco use, and in New York State in particular, not only are vending machines for cigarettes virtually gone (maybe by law, though I’m fuzzy on that), but smoking itself is also outlawed in public establishments. This is a far cry from even ten years ago in the US, and virtually alien to what things were like 50 years ago, but as they say, time marches on. Japan, on the other hand, is somewhat behind the curve.

For one thing, Japan, with the world’s highest concentration of vending machines per capita, also sells cigarettes in them. Said vending machines are usually out on the street, and when I came to Japan the first time two years ago, literally anyone could buy them. Japan does technically have age restrictions on the purchase of tobacco products, just as the US does, but that wouldn’t stop any intrepid youth from simply inserting a few coins and getting the brand they want. It was only this year that the makers finally instituted an age-check in the form of smart cards required to use them. Even with that, though, it’s still jarring to see them out in the open. But I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, since at times it also seems like everybody smokes.

Obviously, not everyone does, and I have a fairly large number of non-smoker friends (partly due to self-selection), but walking down the street, at times you’re liable to see practically every other person with a cigarette in hand, or the implements necessary to light up at a moment’s notice. It’s rather surreal, and made more bizarre by the fact that the usual Japanese consideration for the people around oneself seems to fly out the window the moment they light up. At least in my experience, people are quite careless in where they direct their smoke, which (as you might have guessed) tends to be in my direction.

And then there are the restaurants. As New York used to have prior to the blanket ban on smoking in public places, there is a smoking section and a non-smoking section. However, it would seem that the people who design these spaces are not well acquainted with why the division exists, because more often than not, sitting in the “non-smoking” section entails sitting next to a group of smokers who are in the “smoking” section… which is in the middle of the same room, with no physical barriers whatsoever. In other places, there may be a nominal partition, but its effectiveness at actually blocking the smoke is minimal, at best. At times, it even seems like smokers get first priority, as I’ve personally witnessed customers unable to get into the “smoking” area just light up in the “non-smoking” area where they decided to sit instead, and nobody said anything. On the other hand, that may just be because people don’t really like to “rock the boat” here, the end result being that “strictly prohibited” is more realistically read as “grudgingly tolerated”. It isn’t just due to money considerations that I dine out less often in Japan.

The single most bizarre thing for a country where so many people smoke, though, is that I have seen very few cigarette butts just lying around on the street. In fact, Japan tends not to have too much garbage lying about in general, and that’s in spite of the fact that there are relatively few trashcans to put it in. Generally, people just bring such refuse with them and throw it out when they find a proper receptacle, but it’s still jarring to see. Conscientiousness is good and all, but sometimes it just feels a tad… I don’t know… creepy. One thing I know for sure, though is that I am and will remain a non-smoker for the foreseeable future. Cigarette smoke just irritates me (and my lungs) too much.