One night, when I was out drinking with my friends, I saw a very strange sight: two men were talking about how fearful the nuclear accident in Fukushima was, which was not surprising at all, but what struck me as weird was the fact that both of them were smoking.
“I’m afraid of getting cancer from eating polluted vegetables,” said one of the two, and the other replied “I can’t even let my children play outside. Children are more likely to be affected by radiation.” At first, I thought they were just kidding, but I was soon proven wrong as they continued their conversation in a serious manner. I realized that even those who are very conscious of the health hazards caused by radiation smoke cigarettes without care.
According to a study by the National Cancer Center in Japan, the relative risk for smokers and for those with a spouse who smokes of developing cancer is higher than the risk posed by acute radiation exposure of 1000mSv and 100mSv respectively. Exposure of 1000mSv is equivalent to staying in the suppression pool in the exploded nuclear plant for about one and a half hour, and that of 100mSv is to living in the nuclear evacuation area for 5 years.
The nuclear exposure is no laughing matter, but neither is smoking. The consequences of smoking are terribly underestimated in Japan. Despite the ratification of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in 2005, the Japanese government, which owns a fifty-percent share of Japan Tobacco, the tobacco monopoly in Japan, doesn’t seem to be earnest about carrying it out, saying that the FCTC is not legally binding. As a result, a lot of things are still left to be resolved: a pack of cigarettes costs about half the price of those in Britain; anywhere we go, we see many “cool and sophisticated” ads of cigarettes that say very little about health warnings; smoking in public places, even in elementary schools, is not prohibited by law, although it was supposed to have been banned by 2010, and health insurance does not cover smoking cessation therapy for those whose Brinkman index (the product of the number of cigarettes a day and that of years of smoking) is less than 200, while addiction to nicotine is possible after smoking less than 10 cigarettes.
The leading cause of death in Japan is malignant neoplasms, and among them lung cancers are the most common and prominently increasing. Some people assume that the anti-smoking mood of the last 10 years will decrease lung cancers, but given that a forty-year struggle to campaign against smoking has barely stemmed the increasing rate of lung cancers in the United States and that the smoking rate of Japanese women in their twenties, who could cause their children to smoke, has been increasing, Japan would have to be prepared to walk a long and thorny path. Otherwise the number of lung cancer deaths is going to continue increasing to an even more horrifying extent.
I’m Noriaki L. Santo, a third-year medical student of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, who hopes to be a coloproctologist in the future. Currently studying clinical medicine and supposed to begin three-year clerkship next year. Interested in medicine, Apple, piano music, and cats, to which I'm terribly allergic, though.
