Humans are natural pattern seekers, so see chain smoking cat and Smoking with you behind the supermarket releasing in the same season makes our neurons activate. Major economic shifts and global pandemics may cause golf anime to escape a seventeen-year release drought, so is it impossible that there are larger forces behind a sudden trend in smoking-based anime releases?
To put it bluntly, the popularity of smoking in Japan has greatly decreased. The government has banned indoor smoking in many public places as part of the “Health 21 Japan” initiative, which hopes to reduce the prevalence of adult smoking to just twelve percent by 2032. In 2022, those figures have already reached 16.09%, with an annual reduction rate of 3.75%.1 Seventy percent of Japanese adults now believe that smoking has negative health effects. The Japanese tobacco industry has taken notice.
Japan Tobacco, which owns sixty-six percent of the country’s cigarette market, cited an “increased awareness of smoking-related health issues” and “regulatory development” as key factors to consider at its 2025 investor meeting, while discussing its hope to “further diversify our business beyond the traditional tobacco industry.” This type of strategy is not new for tobacco companies either. RJ Reynolds bought Hawaiian Punch in 1963 and used the same advertising strategies that made Joe Camel so popular with children to boost not only profits, but the entire ultra-processed food industry.2
If a game like Uma Musume could help revive the horse gambling industry in Japan, who’s to say that Japanese tobacco companies might not invest in anime to get people smoking cigarettes again? Since the legal smoking age in Japan is twenty, two seinen manga properties marketed between ages eighteen and thirty would be perfect to capture future smokers and those already able to purchase. More than three times as many men smoke compared to women in Japan, making this demographic perfect for advertising.3
While it seems like every piece of the puzzle is there to complete a perfect picture of the tobacco industry infiltrating the world of anime, there’s just one problem. As Michael Shermer said, “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 in this case, two smokin’ animes in the same season are likely pure coincidence.
Neither Kodansha, Square Enix, Bibury Animation Studios nor Asahi Productions (the main companies that own the manga and animate its adaptations) have significant connections with the tobacco companies that finance their productions that are publicly announced at the time of this writing. Japan Tobacco, while it has expanded into food industries, stated at the aforementioned 2025 investor meeting that its diversification efforts will focus on heated tobacco products, which have greatly increased in popularity in Japan. It might even be more profitable to enter the ever-expanding cannabis and CBD market that has been exploding in the country in recent years. Tobacco companies have little reason to invest in anime studios with declining profits to potentially advertise a product they are already making a lot of money replacing.
Humans can feel physical discomfort and anxiety when pattern recognition fails and data appears truly random. But fortunately, our brains can console themselves with the simplest facts: chain smoking cat and Smoking with you behind the supermarket They were tailored so close to each other because they are extremely popular and cool properties.
chain smoking cat It placed twelfth in the Next Manga Award in the print category the same year it was released. He even had the honor of being in the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! list of best manga for male readers in 2024. Smoking with you behind the supermarket It has more than three million copies in circulation. It comes highly recommended by bookstore employees and editors alike, and was even nominated for Best Manga at the Japan Expo Awards. It would be surprising if the two manga didn’t have anime adaptations with this kind of momentum behind them.
The history of smoking anime characters is long and varied. While our brains may be tempted to view these more overt examples as something worthy of special attention, sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. Perhaps the idea of tobacco companies investing in anime could be re-examined if vaporizers and other heated tobacco products suddenly start appearing in very specific adaptations of the future.
Editor’s note: After this article was originally written, the first episode of Chainsmoker Cat premiered with explicit brands of cigarettes sold by Japan Tobacco. However, they are not listed in the credits as sponsors of the show and may have simply allowed their image to be used as a form of free publicity.