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Smoking scenes in Japanese comics: a preliminary study

Department of International Community Health, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Correspondence to:
S Nakahara; shinji@m.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Keywords: comics; Japan; media

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Smoking repeatedly appears in the media including television,¹ films,^2,3 advertisements,⁴ and books,⁵ and may encourage early initiation of smoking by adolescents.^6,7 Comics are another medium with influence over children and adolescents in many Asian countries. Most comics are imported from Japan where comic magazines sell several million copies every week. Popular titles become TV animation series or theatrical animated films. We examined depiction of smoking in popular comic magazines.

We selected the top four selling magazines according to monthly circulations from each of four categories (girls’, women’s, boys’, and youths’ magazines); data on sales and categorisation were derived from Japan’s periodicals in print.⁸ Magazines for primary to high school students were categorised as boys’ and girls’; those for young adults as youths’ and women’s. We selected four because the top four boys’ magazines sell several times more than the fifth one. A comic magazine carries about 20 titles of serialised . . . [Full text of this article]