The etiquette of public information display

[imomus]

I like the anti-smoking poster campaign currently being run on JR trains in Japan. It's a pretty virulent and imaginative attack on the insensitivity of smokers towards the people around them.



But why does the Health Authority financing the campaign sign off with the slogan 'Meet your delight'? Hang on, this is not an anti-smoking campaign. It's an advertising campaign paid for by Japan Tobacco. I can only assume it's a desperate attempt by the Japanese tobacco industry to demonstrate responsibility and make the case for self-regulation. Except that if you look at what the ads are saying, it's all about proposing a new etiquette of smoking in which it's up to the individual smoker to regulate himself.

I suppose, given the choice between doing the honourable thing -- committing seppuku -- and letting the customer die on their behalf, Japan Tobacco is opting for the customer's death. As long as he realizes that it's up to him to clear up his entrails afterwards in a responsible manner.

Comments

tobacco = death in japan

[(Anonymous)]

i had a debate in my graduate seminar here in japan about whether there is a causal relationship between smoking and cancer (which was somehow related to a paper we read about causal relations in channel management power struggles... beats me.) the prof was a hard-ass, long time smoker who had recently given up but wasn't sold on the links between tobacco and cancer, and preparing for class, we had to read this diatribe written by an ex-JT employee about how the anti-smoking brigades were all educated middle-class goody-goody effetes trying to make the lower classes feel bad about themselves.

i started building a strong case against selling tobacco from a marketing perspective, and then one of the other profs said, "Yes, I noticed that in North America, they are all pretty much sure that tobacco and cancer are related." And it hit me: the Japanese do not even believe that smoking causes cancer. They think, hey maybe there is some correlation, but it's not proven yet. These were highly educated people saying things like "Well, when the link is proven, then we can make better decisions..."

This is what happens when a government monopoly owns tobacco production for a long long time; no one in power benefits from anti-smoking campaigns.

The guy that said that this is a way to ease the growing eldery population is on to something...

But I have this feeling that the death rates in Japan from tobacco are not as high because they eat a lot less junk than Americans and thus have less incidence of heart disease.

Re: tobacco = death in japan

[(Anonymous)]

The Health Ministry has been pushing for a more active
role by the government in alerting the population of the
dangers of smoking (have a browse through the statistics
at the link above). Their attempts are thwarted by the
powerful Ministry of Finance, which gets a lot of it's
revenues from, guess where, JT.

A friend teaching at a medical college in Osaka told me
that some years ago, a few of his colleagues subscribed to a
theory that Japanese were immune to AIDS because of racial
differences in blood types.

An even further-out folk theory I heard from a young woman
in a gaijin bar once: Japanese are protected from AIDS by
all the cigarettes they smoke.