Japanese people used to be one of the heaviest smokers on the planet, so cigarettes have always appeared in anime. But rarely as an object of focus. They were simply too commonplace for that, so they became part of the background until Japan did a 180 on its smoking culture, heavily regulating all things tobacco, like severely limiting smoking spaces. For a few years, cigarettes largely disappeared from anime. But in July this year, they made a surprising comeback in a big way, serving as the main themes in both Chainsmoker Cat (Bibury Animation Studios) and Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You (Asahi Production). Let’s take a closer look at them.
from chainsmoker cat, ep 1
Where There’s Smoke, There Are Two Completely Different Shows
Besides cigarettes, Chainsmoker Cat and Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You have virtually nothing in common. The latter is a slice-of-life rom-com about a good-natured office worker and a supermarket employee developing feelings for each other… with a twist. The office worker, Sasaki, knows the heroine as the sweet and smiling cashier Yamada AND as Tayama, the punk-rock-ish and mysterious woman with whom he sometimes smokes behind her place of work. He literally cannot tell that it’s the same woman simply because “Yamada and Tayama” dress differently and one squints a lot. But, admittedly, fans of rom-coms have been asked to accept more ludicrous premises in the past.
Chainsmoker Cat is a whole other story. It’s actually like five different stories. It’s part urban fantasy set in the modern world that also has cat-like “beastfolks” who are basically human-shaped except for ears and tails. It’s also about addiction, with the main character Yaniko (a play on the word yani, meaning “tar” as in “tobacco residue”) living in squalor and not being able to keep jobs because of her however-many-packs-a-day-she-can-afford habit.
Surprisingly, it’s also a story about “fantastic racism” with the beastfolks facing various prejudices from humans. That part is surprising because Chainsmoker Cat is, above all else, a gross-out comedy featuring scenes of, say, Yaniko’s insufficiently pixelated explosive diarrhea or her spilling a fresh pack of cigarettes and them falling onto a huge poop on the street. She then picks them up anyway, rationalizing that she can just cut off the parts that actually touched the poo. Not exactly a vehicle for delivering nuanced messages about intolerance. The anime also has tons of sex jokes, many of them bordering on the fetishistic.
Why then does Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You feel more… gross?
Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You
Fighting for a Worse, Smellier World
Chainsmoker Cat should never apologize for being disgusting at times. Off-putting shows have their place and audiences in the world. And despite often venturing into beyond-risqué territory, the cat-girl anime at least never makes smoking look pleasant in any form. Yaniko’s bliss whenever she lights up exists alongside her depressing apartment that would need deep cleaning with a power washer to be merely considered “barely livable.”
When she stops smoking for just 30 minutes, she feels and looks like she’s about to die. She chooses nicotine over food. People around her visibly hate her because of her addiction. And although we really don’t want to, we have to bring up the poop scene again…
The anime never stoops down to having some kind of PSA moment. It’s not that sort of show. It firmly believes in showing, not telling. Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You takes a very different approach. In this anime, smoking has no real downsides other than fueling society’s “prejudice” and making two good people sad. In one scene, Sasaki looks for a smoking area while lamenting about how he’s losing his basic human rights. In another, Yamada gets a complaint from a customer because she smells of cigarettes and it’s treated like someone attacked her personhood.
In Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You, cigarettes are at worst innocent stress-relievers, and at best a substitute for Cupid’s arrows. Of course, no one is advocating we persecute and demonize smokers but, also, we should not be OK with a show trying to romanticize smoking and make it socially acceptable again. Ask anyone who lived through the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Everywhere reeked of cigarettes. Everything was smoke-stained. And the secondhand smoke situation was out of control. The American animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers put it best about the past: “[E]ven if you didn’t smoke, you smoked.” That’s the world that Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is essentially longing for.
What the Two Anime Should Quit
Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is technically a well-made anime often told through little scenes without words and featuring, on the whole, likeable characters whom you want to see happy. Plus, it already has a gimmick: the dual Yamada-Tayama identity. That is more than enough for an anime plot. Of course, cigarettes could still make the occasional appearance in the show, since many Japanese people love cigarettes. About 1 in 7 people say they smoke regularly. But using smoking as a framing device for every episode feels like a tack-on that gets in the way of an otherwise charming romance story.
As for Chainsmoker Cat, it needs to keep the cigarettes in. They’re too central to the show’s identity. In fact, the anime should be more about smoking and less about the fantastic racism. The bigotry against beastfolks sometimes muddles up the tone of a scene where you’re not sure if Yaniko is being judged for being a disgusting smoker or because she has cat ears. Chainsmoker Cat is not the right place to tackle something as serious as racial (or species) prejudice, but it has the creative lack of shame to be an animated version of the health warnings they put on cigarette packs, only without sounding condescending or moralizing. Few things will put you off smoking more than a few episodes of Chainsmoker Cat, and there’s power in that.
