much more unyielding. Would I bend to such oppression? Was I not a man?!
A department store sales rep would bring ten cartons of cigarettes to my house once a month. They were the American brand More, of which I would consume around sixty or seventy a day. But then imports of foreign cigarettes were banned. Just before the ban, I stockpiled about two hundred cartons. These soon ran out, and I’ve had to make do with domestic brands ever since.
One day, I was obliged to travel to Tokyo, as I’d been invited to give an address at a literary event. The event was organized by a publishing house that I’d been indebted to for some years. So I asked my wife to reserve me a seat on the train.
“The fares for smoking seats have gone up by 20%,” said my wife as she handed me the ticket. “And there’s only one smoking car. The ticket-seller looked at me as if I were some kind of wild animal!”
I was utterly dismayed on entering the smoking car. The seats were falling apart and the windows covered with grime. Some were cracked for good measure, only held together by little patches of sticky tape. The floor was strewn with litter, the ceiling thick with cobwebs. In this filthy carriage sat seven or eight po-faced smokers. The gloomy strains of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor filtered through the loudspeaker. The ashtrays by the seats were crammed full of cigarette ends, and had evidently not seen a cleaner for some time. On the doors at the ends of the carriage were signs saying “No passage to other carriages”. The toilet at the rear of the carriage was just a hole in the floor, leading down to a vat. Peering through the hole, I could see a pile of human waste. There were no taps at the wash basin – just a tin cup chained to the wall, with a hand-operated water pump.
I was so incensed that I decided to cut my engagement and get out at the next station. From there, I returned home in a taxi. After all, if things were already this bad, who could know what awaited me at the venue, or the hotel?!
Urban tobacconists soon became ostracized by the communities they served. One after another, my local suppliers went out of business, forcing me to walk ever longer distances to make my purchases. In the end, there was only one tobacconist left in my vicinity.
“Don’t tell me you’re giving up, too!” I begged the elderly shopkeeper, adding, “But if you do, could you bring your remaining stock over to my house?”
And that’s just what he did, that very same night. “I’m giving up,” he said as he handed the lot over to me. It seems he’d been waiting for the opportunity to jack it in. When I said what I said, he’d jumped at the chance, gathered his stock and shut up shop.
Discrimination against smokers grew ever more extreme. In other countries, they’d already managed to ban smoking completely. We in Japan lagged behind as usual. Cigarettes were still being sold and people were still smoking them. Non-smokers saw this as a national humiliation, and started treating smokers as less than human. Some who smoked openly were beaten up in the streets.
There is a theory that the nobility of the human soul will always prevent this kind of lunacy from getting out of hand. I beg to differ. Opinions may vary on what exactly is meant by “getting out of hand”. But looking back over the history of mankind, we find countless examples of such lunacy merely leading to greater forms of extremism, such as lynching or mob killings.
Discrimination against smokers quickly grew to the level of a witch-hunt. But it was hard to control, precisely because the discriminators didn’t regard their actions as lunacy. Acts of human savagery are never so extreme as when they are committed in the name of a lofty cause, be it religion, justice or “correctness”. In the name of the modern religion of “health,” and under the banner of justice and correctness, discrimination against smokers soon escalated to the point of murder. A renowned heavy smoker was butchered in the street, and in broad daylight, by a gang of seventeen or eighteen hysterical housewives who were out shopping and two policemen. He’d refused to stop smoking despite repeated requests. It was said that, as he died, nicotine and tar spurted out of holes left