What’s with All the Smoking Anime Lighting up Our Screens?

Human beings are natural pattern seekers, so seeing Chainsmoker Cat and Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You releasing in the same season gets our neurons firing. Major economic shifts and global pandemics can result in golfing anime escaping a seventeen-year release drought, so is it out of the question that greater forces are behind a sudden trend in smoking-based anime releases? 

To put it bluntly, the popularity of smoking in Japan has been on a massive decline. The government has banned smoking indoors in many public places as part of the “Health 21 Japan” initiative, which hopes to reduce smoking prevalence in adults to only twelve percent by 2032. In 2022, those numbers already reached 16.09%, with an annual reduction rate of 3.75%.¹ Seventy percent of Japanese adults now believe that smoking has negative impacts on health. The Japanese tobacco industry has taken notice.

Japan Tobacco, the holders of sixty-six percent of the country’s cigarette market, listed an “increase in awareness of health concerns related to smoking” and “regulatory development” as key factors to consider in their 2025 Investor Meeting, while also discussing their hope to “further diversify our business beyond the traditional tobacco industry.” This kind of strategy isn’t new to tobacco companies, either. R.J. Reynolds purchased Hawaiian Punch in 1963 and used the same advertising strategies that made Joe Camel so popular with kids to drive not only profits, but the entire ultra-processed food industry forward.²

If a game like Uma Musume could help revive the horse gambling industry in Japan, who is to say that Japanese tobacco companies might not invest in anime to get people to smoke cigarettes again? With the legal smoking age in Japan being twenty years old, two seinen manga properties marketed at eighteen to thirty-year-olds would be perfect in capturing would-be future smokers and those already able to purchase. Over three times the amount of men smoke compared to women in Japan, making the demographic a perfect fit to advertise to.

While it seems like every piece of the puzzle is there to complete a perfect picture of the tobacco industry creeping into the world of anime, there’s just one problem. As Michael Shermer put it, “Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.” The truth of the matter is that two smoking anime in the same season are, in this instance, likely to be purely coincidence.

Neither Kodansha, Square Enix, Bibury Animation Studios, nor Asahi Productions—the main companies that own the manga and are animating their adaptations—have any major connections to tobacco companies funding their productions that are publicly advertised at the time of writing. Japan Tobacco, while having expanded into food industries, stated in the aforementioned 2025 Investor Meeting that their diversification efforts will be focused on heated tobacco products, which have been massively spiking in popularity in Japan. It might even be more profitable to enter the ever expanding CBD and cannabis market that has been exploding in the country in recent years. Tobacco companies have little reason to invest in anime studios with declining profits for potentially advertising a product they are already making lots of money replacing. 

Humans can feel physical discomfort and anxiety when pattern recognition fails and data looks truly random. But thankfully, our brains can be comforted by the simplest of data points — Chainsmoker Cat and Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You got adapted so close to each other because they are extremely popular and fresh properties.

Chainsmoker Cat was ranked twelfth in the Next Manga Award for the print category the same year it was released. It was even honored by being in the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! list of best manga for male readers in 2024. Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You has over three million copies in circulation. It is heavily recommended by bookstore employees and publishers alike, and was even nominated for Best Manga at the Japan Expo Awards. It would be surprising if the two manga didn’t get anime adaptations with this kind of momentum behind them.

The history of anime characters smoking is long and varied. While our brains may be tempted to see these more overt examples as something worth extra notice, sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. Perhaps the idea that tobacco companies are investing in anime can be reexamined if vapes and other heated tobacco products suddenly start showing up in highly specific adaptations of the future.

Editor’s Note: After this article was originally written, the first episode of Chainsmoker Cat premiered with explicit branding from cigarettes sold by Japan Tobacco. However, they are not listed in the credits as sponsors of the show and may have merely allowed their likeness to be used as a form of free advertising.

1. Jamil H, Gilmour S, Katanoda K, et al Regional disparities in Japan’s progress towards the Health Japan 21 smoking reduction target Tobacco Control Published Online First: 17 April 2025. doi: 10.1136/tc-2024-059088 ↩︎
2. Fischer, P. M. (1991). Brand logo recognition by children aged 3 to 6 years. JAMA, 266(22), 3145. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1991.03470220061027 ↩︎