While smoking rates have plunged throughout the rest of the industrialized world, Japan continues to have the highest percentages of adults who smoke: 55.2 percent of men and 13.3 percent of women in 1998. Both rates represent increases over the figures for 1997, which were 52.7 percent and 11.6 percent respectively. The rate for men is climbing back to near its postwar peak and is clearly on the increase among minors, male and female alike, even though it is ostensibly illegal for them to buy or use tobacco products.

Given this situation, it comes as no surprise that the government health bureaucracy should be embroiled in a mounting controversy over plans to reduce tobacco consumption in this country. The Health and Welfare Ministry had barely announced plans for a new campaign to reduce tobacco use by half by the year 2010 before Japan Tobacco Inc., the now-privatized giant domestic cigarette manufacturer, and industry associations representing tobacco farmers and retailers were up in arms, demanding that the target be dropped or reconsidered in view of its expected impact on their livelihoods. For the time being, the ministry is refusing to back down.

If its target is not to be considered hopelessly unrealistic, however, the steps undertaken to achieve it will have to be far more comprehensive and effective than any program to discourage smoking that the ministry has attempted so far. The proposal is part of an overall 10-year plan to improve the public's health in a number of areas, with special emphasis on the growing number of Japanese with diabetes as well as on tobacco and alcohol abuse. The smoking target was contained in a report titled "Health Japan 21" that was submitted by a subcommittee to the Health and Welfare Ministry's Council on Public Health. Official approval is anticipated by the end of the year following local hearings and solicitations of public opinion through the Internet.

Since the powerful forces arrayed against it suggest the ministry may yet be forced to backtrack, it now seems the subcommittee members would have been better advised to stick to their original idea of emphasizing the nation's rapidly rising rates of lung cancer and heart disease, now the leading causes of death among Japanese men, rather than smoking rates. The panel may argue that smoking rates will make it easier to determine the program's short-term effectiveness, but critics have long charged ministry officials with downplaying the constantly mounting evidence of the health risks posed by tobacco smoke.

Only days after the proposal to halve the number of Japanese smokers within 10 years was floated, the results of a New Zealand study published in a British medical journal indicating that secondhand smoke -- that is, the breathing in of other people's cigarette smoking -- appears to increase the risk of a stroke for nonsmokers by 82 percent, far greater than previously thought. Medical researchers are becoming increasingly convinced that the rates of such health threats as heart disease and heart attack, lung and breast cancer and respiratory illness now attributed to smoking have been seriously underestimated because the effects of secondhand smoke have not received sufficient attention.

The New Zealand study is expected to strengthen current campaigns to prohibit smoking in offices and other workplaces and in public areas. How much effect will it have here? A little-noted additional proposal in the report submitted to the health ministry calls for a total ban on smoking in such places in Japan. A number of office buildings have successfully declared themselves totally smoke-free zones. For such a ban to be effective in public spaces, however, requires the force of law and the imposition of penalties on offenders, unlike the widely ignored "voluntary" prohibitions now supposedly in effect in urban subway stations and on train-station platforms.

No one is calling for a ban on the sale of cigarettes, which would be pointless and ineffective in view of the numbers of people who choose to smoke despite the risks involved. Making them less easily available to minors, providing the public with more complete information on the dangers and protecting the health ministry is supposed to be part of a comprehensive plan to deal with geriatric disease in Japan's rapidly aging population. That noble intention was willfully undermined last week on Respect for the Aged Day with the dispatch of free cartons of cigarettes by Japan Tobacco to some residents of homes for the elderly.