世論 What Japan Thinks

The Smoking Cessation Information Centre recently sponsored research to discover what smokers’ reactions to tax hikes in cigarettes would be. They interviewed 1,980 smokers via an internet-based questionnaire at the start of December. This poll is rather timely as there are plans to raise the tobacco tax by a mere 20 yen per packet, to about 290 yen for 20, probably still the cheapest in the developed world.

Of course, people saying they are going to quit and people actually quitting are two different things. All the evidence suggests that raising taxes brings in more money overall, as the rate of quitters never reaches the rate of tax increase. Anything that does something to decrease the number of smokers, however, is most welcome. Simple things like effective smoking segregation at restaurants are not yet implemented here. Even though most restaurants (rather than izakaya pubs-with-food places) are heavily frequented by women (in my experience it’s often over 75%, and quite often, in fact, I am the only man there!) and only about 10% of women smoke, few restaurants are all non-smoking; in fact often it is either 50:50 or no segregation at all!

Also note that at least one in eight do not seem to believe the literature telling you smoking is bad for you, and two-thirds think it’s expensive.

The demographic information is as follows. Note that of the 1,980 people in the survey, only 1,779 responded to this question.

	20-29 years old	30-39 years old	40-49 years old	50-59 years old	60-69 years old
Male	261	348	280	305	163
Female	99	124	87	112	combined with previous

First, they asked people at what price would they decrease their smoking habit, and at what price would they quit. If the data is presented in a cumulative fashion, the following table is obtained.

Q1: At what price would you either cut down or quit smoking? (Sample size=1,980)

	Cut down	Quit
300 yen	21.2%	4.3%
350 yen	39.5%	13.6%
400 yen	54.0%	23.5%
500 yen	71.5%	51.2%
600 yen	72.3%	54.8%
700 yen	72.9%	57.3%
800 yen	73.1%	60.0%
900 yen	73.1%	60.2%
1000 yen	75.1%	73.4%
Over 1000 yen	76.6%	75.4%
Never	24.6%	23.4%

Q2: What would motivate you into quitting smoking? (Sample size=1,980, up to three answers)

My own willpower	59.1%
Tobacco price rises	54.7%
For the children	24.8%
Effective anti-smoking medical aids (nicotine patch, gum, etc)	18.2%
Spread of non-smoking and segregated ares	14.8%
Trustworthy research on the damaging effects of tobacco	12.5%
Encouragement to quit from family or doctor, etc	11.5%
I won’t quit	6.2%

I notice that the above table does not contain an option related to quitting due to witnessing a friend, or the smoker himself, suffering ill-health related to smoking.

Q3: How do you think smoking affects your health? (Sample size=1,980)

	This survey 2005	Last survey 2002
May cause a fatal disease	32.5%	20.6%
May cause illness	50.3%	50.3%
Bad for the body but not cause illness	9.3%	16.0%
No effect on health	3.4%	5.8%
Don’t know	4.4%	7.0%

It looks like the message has been getting through since the last survey, but the figures still look rather low.

Q4: When did you start smoking? (Sample size=1,980)

19 years old or under	34.5%
20 to 24 years old	53.4%
24 to 29 years old	6.5%
30 to 34 years old	2.7%
35 years old or over	2.9%

Q5: What do you think about the current price of tobacco? (Sample size=1,980)

	This survey 2005	Last survey 2002
Expensive	63.9%	56.2%
Normal	34.2%	41.5%
Cheap	1.9%	0.5%

Amazing figures! 20 cigarettes are cheaper than a 500 ml can of standard beer, or two 330 ml cans of cheap froth, but are judged to be expensive by almost two-thirds of the respondents.

When asked about the price of their usual smokes, the mean price was 277.8 yen and the median 270 yen, with the only significant variation being women in their twenties, who pay a mean 290.4 yen and median 300 yen, as there are a lot of slightly more expensive cigarettes aimed at young women.

As for how much they spend every month on tobacco, the mean was 8,540.7 yen, which when combined with the mean price of 277.8 yen per pack gives us just about a pack a day. Men in their fifties spent the most at 10,175.0 yen, or almost 25 cancer sticks per day. Women also as they got older spent more on slightly cheaper cigarettes, going from under 15 per day in their twenties to almost 19 per day in their fifties and sixties.