i first saw japan tobacco’s surreal ‘tobacco etiquette‘ advertising campaign five years ago in the tokyo subway, and i thought it was just a unique and japanese way of discouraging smoking by appealing to a sense of communal responsibility. only yesterday did i see that the anti-smoking vignettes are interspersed with totally unrelated advice against listening to headphones (above) and wearing a backpack in the subway (below). belatedly i realized that these ‘etiquette’ ads are much more insidious than they would appear: they equate smoking with innocuous behaviors, legitimizing it; they present smoking as a mere problem of politeness, one that can be resolved with proper etiquette.
