History
Until 1985, the tobacco industry was a government-run monopoly; the government of Japan is still involved in in the industry through the Ministry of Finance, which after a sell-off in March 2013, now owns only one third of Japan Tobacco's outstanding stock, and the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, which is active in public health and other tobacco control policy making.
The Diet of Japan has many MPs who have interests in the tobacco industry and thus tobacco control legislation is uncommon.
Non-smoking areas are becoming increasingly common in Japan, in homes, offices, restaurants, pachinko parlors and public areas, even in fast food or family restaurants. Kanagawa Prefecture enacted Japan's first smoke-free public places ordinance in 2009 and Hyogo Prefecture followed with a similar law in 2012. All trains either have non-smoking cars or are completely smoke-free, as are many train stations platforms in urban areas.
Read more about this topic: Smoking In Japan
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)