Last year, a survey was given to Japanese manga publishers about what top 5 manga to recommend for 2023 and the number one title was symbolic of many things related to Japanese culture – one of which was smoking.

The title was called Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You by Jinushi. I got a chance to read Volume 1 recently and it’s a very fascinating romantic comedy about a middle-aged salaryman and a early 20s’ female convenience store clerk and how they’re bound by their love of smoking. The author made a comment saying that their admiration of how cool smoking was in fiction was a huge inspiration in creating the story.

Which got me thinking about how much smoking is prevalent in the anime and manga worlds and how much characters who smoke are beloved by many.

When I was still exploring new titles to follow in my ‘20s, one that stood out to me was Great Teacher Onizuka. The main character was someone who was a total idiot, but was pretty badass. Oh yeah, he smoked. I later got into Rurouni Kenshin and fell in love with Saito Hajime. Oh yeah, he smokes. A LOT. It’s funny because I got into comics because of X-Men and the characters Wolverine and Gambit smoked quite a bit. I liked both, but not as much as the anime/manga characters who smoked.

When you think about it, there’s a lot of anime/manga characters who smoke. Sanji from One Piece, Revy from Black Lagoon, Nara Shikamaru from Naruto, Toshiro Hijikata from Gintama, several adult characters from Cowboy Bebop (like Spike Siegel pictured above) – I could go on.

In video games, there’s Yakuza/Like a Dragon characters and one of my favorite heroines ever, VA-11 Hall-A’s Jill Stingray, smokes.

I love how cool all of those characters look when they smoke and I don’t even smoke. I don’t want to because of all the health risks smoking entails. My father used to be a smoker, but quit before I reached junior high school because he was having health problems.

At the same time, I do something a bit silly. I pretend to smoke with the air around me. I like to pretend I’m holding an imaginary cigarette to my mouth and inhale/exhale oxygen when no one’s looking. It’s a habit I’ve built from following my favorite characters who smoke.

Smoking is indeed something that shouldn’t be romanticized. But I think about why people smoke in the first place – particularly my dad and Chinese people (particularly men) smoked. I remember one time when I was at a Chinese doctor’s office, there was a video played for Chinese people addicted to smoking. There was a doctor in the video who said when Chinese people immigrate to the United States, they’re often exposed to a lot of stressors (usually related to acculturation) that weigh a ton. Smoking is one way to help process and relieve their stress. They’re coming from a country where smoking is definitely the norm in their culture.

There’s a lot of talk about smoking being a sign of maturity and surviving through tough times. I decided to look up the relationship between smoking and mental health/illness. It’s not surprising that there’s negative effects. People with depression and anxiety may smoke a bit more than those who aren’t affected by them. What makes it really hard for them to quit is that smoking has social benefits. Nicotine can help calm nerves and make smokers feel more confident in behaving in a proper social manner.

When I think about the many characters who smoke, smoking does help them before they get ready to take on a big task involving other people. It’s literally the calm before the storm. Hell, I do “oxygen smoke” as a way to feel calm before facing reality or having big conversations with my friends. But I was drilled so hard by United States anti-drug programs (when compared to Asia) that I didn’t want to feel like I was dying. That’s why I never took the plunge despite the coolness of smoking found in Japanese media and try to encourage anti-smoking measures. Plus I think it helped that I wasn’t super-stressed despite my mental illness to the point where I resorted to substances. Plus I had people who genuinely cared about my well-being and a somewhat optimistic belief in the best of humanity.

While Japanese media (and other Asian media in general) continues to showcase smoking to a decent degree, there’s contentious pushback in America over the portrayal of smoking in their media. Yet smoking rates in Japan have gone down though quite a bit over the years due to anti-smoking measures. It’s not as low as health organizations would like, but progress is progress.

The only thing I think we can agree on is that the world is so cruel and there should be wider acknowledgement of how the bad parts of life can lead people down to dangerous substances in order to cope. I think this is what creators intend to show when they have characters who smoke. Yeah, they look cool, but they’re flawed people trying to find some sense of meaning/connection to worlds that disappoint them over and over again.

We’re just trying to find ways to breathe life into inner peace, whether it’s with oxygen or smoke.