No smoking please - Tokyo style

(After a lot of traveling I am back in Shanghai, this time for a month. This will enable me to improve the frequency of postings on my blog I hope!)


There has been a lot of controversy recently in the Netherlands on the smoking bans in bars and restaurants. I was quite surprised to see on a recent trip to Tokyo that they had gone a step further than that by imposing a ban on smoking in public. Smoking is now confined to specific smoking areas.

The local government has also put various posters to inform the public on the danger of smoking outdoors. Strangely enough there are still a lot of coffee shops, bars and restaurants which still have very large smoking areas. It makes you wonder about the priorities they have in Tokyo.