We received a thank you card from my mother today, thanking us for sending her a lot of photos of Kaika. Attached to the card, as if in afterthought, was a post-it note with the following written on it:
I was horrified to see a cigarette in the same picture with Kaika. Kurt, keep him protected from the secondhand smoke. I mean this!
She was referring to this photo of Kaika with his maternal grandparents, in which my father-in-law has a cigarette dangling from his fingers. I do admit I paused before including the photo in the packet I sent her, for fear it might get her back hairs to stand up. My mother has always been a vigilant anti-smoking advocate, especially as it relates to children. When I was a kid, long before the term “secondhand smoke” entered the common lexicon (according to this article, the possible effects of secondhand smoke, or ETS as it’s officially known, first came into public knowledge around 1984), my mother had no problems turning to cigarette-smoking passengers on a bus, for example, and asking “Could you please not smoke here? It’s not good for my children.”
My father-in-law doesn’t smoke in the house, nor the car. In point of fact, Naoko is just as vigilant as my mother, and it was her concern about secondhand smoke that forced him outside the house to indulge his habit, several years ago. Unfortunately, as my mother wouldn’t know, and for the time-being I’m not going to tell her, the real problem is not with my father-in-law (or sister-in-law, for that matter, who also smokes), but with this entire country, where there exist very few non-smoking places, and few laws to protect those of us who don’t smoke.
Let’s take Kaika to the local department store. It’s supposedly no-smoking in there, but in reality one can smoke in the food court, which takes up half of the entire first floor. Coffee houses? Forget about it! With the well-publicized exception of Starbucks, you might as well cut to the chase and give the kid a cigarette directly. Restaurants? Well, some (but not all) have no-smoking sections, but little good do those actually do. You can segregate customers in tiny token no-smoking sections, but you can’t segregate cigarette smoke.
Recently some measures have been in the news recently, such as Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward banning smoking on its streets in the summer of 2002, or private railway stations in Tokyo banning smoking on train platforms on May 1st of this year. However, in the case of the former, the impetus for the ban was not the dangers of secondhand smoke, but rather to help cut down on cigarette butt litter, and because smoking in public is “bad manners.” In the case of the private railway stations’ ban, the action was taken by these companies, according to this Foreign Press Center Japan article,
[…] in line with the Health Promotion Law that went into effect on May 1. The new law imposes a legal obligation to prevent passive smoking, which refers to people unwillingly inhaling the secondhand smoke of others and can be extremely unpleasant and irritating for nonsmokers. It covers places used by the general public, including gymnasiums and department stores, as well as train stations.
This is all well and good, and indicates an increased awareness of the problem of secondhand smoke in a nation where 30 million people smoke, including nearly 50% of all adult males. (I suppose one should look on the bright side: in 1966, 85% of adult Japanese males smoked!) But the fact that the Ministry of Health and Welfare, which promulgated the new “health promotion” law, couldn’t even see fit to get rid of all the cigarette vending machines in its own headquarters building, seems to indicate that the government is not prepared to put its money where its mouth is.
Rather, it talks out of both sides of that mouth, and puts the money into the state coffers. Japan Tobacco, the 3rd largest cigarette maker in the world, and ostensibly privatized since 1985, is in fact still two-thirds owned by the Finance Ministry, although it is planning to sell off its equity share, at some point. According to this article, the government rakes in $18 billion U.S. a year on cigarette tax (60% of Japan’s $2/pack price is tax).
And so, despite the fact that over 100,000 Japanese each year die from tobacco-related illnesses, and that the cost of medical treatment for illnesses related to cigarette smoking is ¥1.3 trillion ($11 billion U.S.), I can’t see any ministry of the government getting really serious about this nasty killer, as long as it’s in their financial interests to look the other way, and there are Diet members and ministerial bureaucrats around to protect those interests.
So Mama, Naoko and I will do our best to protect Kaika from secondhand cigarette smoke, but please realize we’re fighting an uphill battle.
