Category: English Articles

In these decades, the situation of smoking  has radically changed in Japan.  Here is the data of smokers in Japan:

• 1965: male 82, female 16 (%)
• 1975: male 76, female 15
• 1985: male 65, female 14
• 1995: male 59, female 15
• 2005: male 46, female 14
• 2015: male 31, female 9

In the 1980’s,  it was so common to smoke in a car, even if there was a child.  If you watch old Japanese movies, you could find guys are smoking anytime and anywhere. Now, smokers are impounded in small and  usually shabby cages  named “smoking space.”

Considering The Right for Non-smokers by Isayama Yoshiro was published in 1983, when the right was not publicly recognized in Japan.  In this book, the author should have explained “passive smoking” as an unknown concept.

The Sociology of Cigarettes, published in 1992, is a Japanese translation of  a Cigarettes by Ronald Troyer and Gerald Markle.  In the postscript, the translators point out several common features between America and Japan as follows: (1) Female smokers had been stigmatized. (2)  The military systems had provided legitimacy for smoking with utilizing cigarettes  as a prize.  (3)  Medical claims had  served to restrict smoking in public spaces. (4) But, at the same time, the sales of cigarettes was increasing at that time.

 The Ecology of Passive Smoking by Murata Yohei is a more recent book published  in 2012.  The author pays attention to the fact that there is a large gender difference of smoking behavior in Japan, and criticizes advertisements for cigarette in the Goffmanian way.

In Japan, cigarette and tea have been the traditional means for relaxing in daytime.  For example, there is a local folk term “do tobacco[tabako suru],”  which means taking a work time.  One of the two main means for break is almost purged by medical interpretation now.

[Data source]

Japan Health Promotion & Fitness Foundation <http://www.health-net.or.jp/tobacco/product/pd090000.html>

[Citation]

伊佐山芳郎『嫌煙権を考える』（岩波新書、1983年）

Ｒ．トロイヤー、G．マークル『タバコの社会学』（中河伸俊・鮎川潤訳、世界思想社、1992年）

村田洋平『受動喫煙の環境学』（世界思想社、2012年）

［E0010/170922］

Yasuhiko Yoshikazu is famous as the animator who designed the characters for Mobile Suite Gumdam. Readers of his autobiography titled Genten (Original Point) should be surprised that his success as an animator is just peripheral in his life.

In 1949 Yasuhiko was born in a city in Hokkaido, as a son of a mint farmer.  Then he went to Hirosaki University in Aomori, and became a leading activist of student movement in the university.  In 1969, he was arrested for forcedly occupying headquarters of the university.  He says, “I was chased off from Hirosaki University, so slipped into the world of animation film.”

After moving to Tokyo, Yasuhiko joined Mushi Puro as the animation production company established by Osamu Tezuka, but it went bankrupt soon.  In the other company, he participated as a staff in the production of Space Battleship Yamato (1974-75).    In 1979, he produced Mobile Suit Gumdam as a character designer and animation supervisor.  The success of Gumdam made him a top animator in Japan, however he suddenly abandoned the status and decided to devote himself to making comic arts treating historical themes.

Creators in the generation, who had grown in the 1960’s at the height of student movements, often educated themselves and cultivated  critical eyes toward the society in different ways of committing to the movements.   On the other hand, it is equally a fact that student movements in that time had some vacant and silly aspects.  Yasuhiko respectively describes the scenes of the student movement in Hirosaki University with a sense of desperate stagnation, partly as his own mood in that time.

In echoes of Yasuhiko’s experience, the story of Gumdum has a social philosophical theme as “desperate impossibility of mutual understanding among people.”  I, or a child born in 1976, just enjoyed building plastic models of Gumdum characters, without understanding the story.

Reference:  安彦良和・斉藤光政『原点』（岩波書店、2017年）

［E0009/170706=J0015］

It is well known as a terrible and sinful incident in the history of Japan that many innocent Korean immigrants and some socialist persons were killed after the Great Kanto Earthquake, in the name of social security.  However, the Fukudamura incident, which happened at a village in Chiba behind the confusion in 1923,  was hardly known until some researchers had revealed it in recent decades.   Tsujino Yayoi, the author of the book Fukudamura Incident, is one of the researchers.

In the incident, some families of travelling merchants were confused with Korean because of their “strange” local accent, and then murdered.   Ten people including  a pregnant woman fell victim.  It resulted from complex discrimination in Japan against the Korean immigrants and unsettled people of planetary life.

Even in their homeland, the victims were segregated as a kind of lower cast.  It was the reason for that nobody had tried to give an eye to the dreadful fact after the incident until recent days.

Of course the incident as such is so terrible and unacceptable.  At the same time, as well as in the murder case of Korean immigrants after the earthquake,  it is also seriously problematic that the responsibility for the incident has been obscured, and the incident has been sometimes legitimated with the reason of the killers’ will “to protect our village.”  This kind of mindset may survive in some part of the Japanese society today, I guess.

Reference: 辻野弥生『福田村事件』（崙書房出版、2013年）

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