Every time our family sits down in a restaurant in Japan, my 11-year-old sniffs the air with disgust. He waves a hand through the cigarette haze and glares at the smokers all around us. "What's the matter with these people?" he growled when we went out for a meal the other day. "Didn't anyone ever teach them that smoking is bad for you?"
"Probably not. At least not in school," I said. "Dad and I learned that lesson when we were kids. That's because anti-tobacco education was introduced in American schools way back in the 1960s. But Japanese schools still don't teach kids about the dangers of smoking."
My younger son stopped playing with the menu and looked up. "Yes, they do," he said. "The health teacher talked to us about tobacco today."