An October price increase on cigarettes may reduce Japan’s reputation of a smoker’s paradise.

Smoking as a socially inadmissible habit will become very soon a norm for Japan. In present smoke-free bars and restaurants are a rarity and cigarettes sold for 300 yen (about $3.45) per pack are considered very cheap.

Meanwhile Japan’s reputation of a smoker’s paradise is facing its sharp changes for decades with the implementation this autumn of a price increase that will constitute about 400 yen per pack. The price increase that comes into effect in October 1, is a sign that Japan’s government attitudes have changed and they decided to hit smokers where it mostly hurts – in their pockets.

Also there are signs showing that things are changing in the country where cancer kills one in three people, with lung cancer the biggest killer among other dangerous diseases. Japan cigarettes packs have bigger health warnings, but they are not so memorable as in Canada and Great Britain. The implementation of Taspo (tobacco passport) ID cards made more complicated for minors to buy cigarettes from cigarette vending machines. Also the Kanagawa prefecture banned smoking in schools, hospitals and other public places and buildings.

Japan Tobacco, the world’s third leading tobacco giant with a 65 % share of the local market is facing the sales drop every year since 1999. In present the leading tobacco company that sells more than 100 brands is reducing its cigarette production by about 4 % per year.

October’s price change will be accompanied by a tax increase and price rise introduced by tobacco producers that hope to compensate an expected decline in sales.

Though Japan is the fourth largest consumer of tobacco products by volume after China, the United States and Russia, Japan Tobacco thinks that social and demographic changes are witnessing against cigarette smoking.

“We were against the tax increases but the government has made its decision so we have to cope with it. We will focus on innovation and improving our tobacco products in accordance with the received requests from our customers”, declared Hideyuki Yamamoto, manager of Japan Tobacco’s media and investor relations division.

As traditional cigarette smoking decreases, Japan Tobacco will try to extend other forms of nicotine replacement, as for example their newly produced Zero Style Mint, the world’s first smokeless cigarette.

Campaigners accede that the price increase is a step in the right decision, but it is not enough. Even at 400 yen (about $4.60) per pack it will still constitute only a third of the price charged in Britain.

“We want to make a pack of cigarettes cost at least 1,000 yen ($11.50). As tobacco products are still very cheap in Japan. We want to turn Japan into a place where to buy a pack of cigarettes will be very difficult”, declared Bungaku Watanabe director of the Tobacco Problem Information Center in Tokyo.