So, you're still smoking

摘要

There is a phrase in Japanese to describe tobacco: "A hundred evils and nothing good," Some might perhaps wish to contest the statement that there is nothing good about tobacco, but everyone knows that smoking tobacco can seriously damage your health. In Japan, 48.3% of men and 13.6% of women smoke. Both of these figures are lower than the previous year (according to a 2003 Japan Tobacco survey). The percentage of Japanese men who smoke has continued to decrease steadily over the past eight years, bu t it still remains almost twice as high as that of the industrialized countries of Europe and North America, And while the percentage of women who smoke is lower in Japan than in either Europe or North America, over the past few years there has been a ma rked increase in the number of women in their 20s who smoke.