smoking

"It cannot be said that JT recognizes it would lead the general public to develop diseases and die if it continues producing and selling (cigarettes)," presiding Judge Kunio Mizuno said.

What Japan Thinks has a post about a survey of how Japanese youths view smoking.

The most surprising part of the survey is the conclusion that the drop in smoking and drinking among the young in Japan is because an increasing number of school-age kids don't have any friends, so there is no peer pressure to indulge in underage vices.

The percentage of smokers in Japan has fallen below a quarter of the adult population for the first time, with both men and women lighting up less, according to the results of a nationwide survey released Friday by Japan Tobacco Inc.

A Chinese county has dropped a plan to order its officials to collectively smoke nearly a quarter of a million packs of cigarettes after a public outcry, a report said.

The Gong'an county government in central China's Hubei province was persuaded to change its policy after officials further up the state bureaucracy intervened, the Beijing Times reported.

The public generators of tobacco based carcinogenic particulate matter are my biggest obstacle to daily bliss when living in Japan.

Japan may tighten rules on smoking in public facilities, a health official said, but he denied a report that Japan could announce plans to ban smoking in public facilities as soon as next month.

Both suspects and investigators have been free to smoke during interrogations up until now, but starting from February Feb. 15, they will have to take breaks and smoke in designated areas.

Japanese scientists have identified the gene that transports nicotine from the roots of tobacco plants to their leaves, opening the way for the creation of nicotine-free cigarettes

Professor Kazufumi Yazaki, a plant molecular biologist at Kyoto University's Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere, claims to have identified the gene in tobacco that transports nicotine.

He says creating a cigarette that still tastes of tobacco but does no damage to human health is his next aim.

Japanese investigators say that survival rates are better for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who never smoked than in NSCLC patients with a history of smoking. Other disease characteristics are different as well.

Singer Wada Akiko (58) was diagnosed with potentially serious health problems during a medical checkup on Sunday's edition of her show "Akko ni Omakase." Akko is a renowned boozer and heavy smoker. Meanwhile another guest on the show, Degawa Tetsuro (44), was diagnosed with kidney stones in both kidneys and inflammation of his liver.