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Comment by dbul | Hacker News Reader

This is unbelievable: it looks like they are faking child births, too! The rate is up a whopping 15%.

http://web.archive.org/web/20120203092942/https://www.cia.go...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Also, from my experience smoking seems to be rare both in Tokyo and the countryside, so I'd like the see some statistics about Japanese being "smoking fiends" before I assertTrue().

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I can't find the data for faking child births from the links, but since the Democratic Party instituted "Child Credits" between 2009 and 2012 (iirc), where families would receive something like $200/child/month, I wouldn't be surprised if people were faking births.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_in_Japan#Prevalence

Males: 37%, females: 9%.

Compare with 22/17, M/F in the USA.

[edit] Beaten to the punch, apologies for the double post.

A fine place to start of course:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_in_Japan

25% of the population smokes, and their rate among adults is roughly 55% higher than in the US.

Rare in Tokyo? Are you kidding? They even have public smoking booths so that people can smoke in otherwise restricted areas.

He was maybe confused since it's now forbidden to smoke in many large public areas outside of confined spaces marked off for smoking, like the areas around train stations. There's less smoking-and-walking in general.

From my understanding and observations when I visited Japan for a couple of weeks, Japanese people don't eat/drink/smoke while walking. Even for outside vendors, they will eat it on a nearby bench or stand and eat it before moving again.

I did see smokers often in the smoking areas. More than I see in NYC.

>Japanese people don't eat/drink/smoke while walking.

What about all those Japanese schoolgirls that run to school with a piece of toast hanging out of their mouths because they overslept?

An exception to this that I wasn't aware of until just last month is the boarding platform for the bullet trains in some stations. I had to walk through a dense cloud of cigarette smoke on my way to my bullet train car at 9am on a Sunday. That was not pleasant.

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