Why is smoking so cool in anime?

By Yash Srivastava

Listen, I love myself a good smoke. I like every aspect of it, especially after a long and boring lecture. The smoke shop is like a little buffet, light or strong, flavoured or unflavoured. I usually just grab one that feels right for the mood and smoke away. Yeah yeah, it’s destroying my lungs and it’s harmful to my well-being. But can you really blame a guy for enjoying a cig? Especially when they make them look so damn cool?

Not to say anime was the reason for my little nicotine addiction, but it has certainly romanticised it further. Josei anime in particular loves to use cigarettes to signify adulthood and dependency. A good example of this is Nana. Hey, fun fact, in 2006, the Japanese anti-smoking association protested against this anime because it made young people (especially women) view smoking as fashionable due to the sheer number of characters who were smokers. I will be talking about two of the characters, Nana Osaki and Yasu. Nana is often seen smoking throughout the series, and her cigarettes serve as a visual representation of her rebellious and independent nature. Her smoking habit aligns with her punk rock persona and contributes to her image as a strong, assertive, and mysterious character. Nana also attempted to quit smoking as she believed it was ruining her voice, but failed. The cigarettes tell us a lot about her character; for example, she switched her brand of cigarettes (seven stars) to that of Yasu’s (black stones) at a turning point in the series and her band was also named after Yasu’s cigarettes. Smoking can also be a metaphor for intimacy― we see Nana and her boyfriend smoking the same brand of cigarettes. At warmer points in the series, characters could be seen lighting each other’s cigarettes.

Ask anyone who has seen that anime whether they think Nana and Yasu were cool and you will get a resounding yes as an answer. But is it the cigarettes that make them cool or the other traits that we associate with the idea of coolness? The independent nature of the characters is only added onto by the visual of smoking; I am pretty sure if you gave a character like Rent-a-girlfriend’s protagonist a cigarette, that would only emphasise his pathetic nature, and you would not see him as cool.

So do I think that anime makes cigarettes look cooler? I certainly think so. A more recent example could be seen in ‘Chainsaw-man’ and its romanticisation of cigarettes, even though the characters clearly know that it’s bad. But hey, as a mature audience, I think it is better to look at cigarettes as tools for enhancing a character’s traits rather than something that defines them.