– You don’t smoke at all, right?
[That’s right. I never have.]

– Isn’t that rather unusual? For a man. Do you have smokers around you?
[I do. Quite a few. Until recently, ken-chan didn’t smoke either. He took it up about five or six years ago. ken-chan and I grew up together, and we’ve been in the band together for a long time, too. For the longest time we were the only two out of all the members who didn’t smoke. Also, the drummer we had in the past didn’t smoke, and neither does the president of the record company L’Arc is associated with.]

– How unexpected. tetsu-san, does anyone in your family smoke?
[Nobody smoked at our home.]

– I suppose that must have been a large influence, right?
[It might have been, but basically, I hate the smell of it. I don’t even like perfumes. Especially since the scent of tobacco clings to clothes and hair, it really stinks doesn’t it? I hate that.]

– So then tetsu-san, you’d be a bit harsh with a girl who smokes, wouldn’t you?
[I fundamentally hate it. I don’t think it’s cool, and if I had a girlfriend who was a smoker, I’d want her to quit. Otherwise, she’d have to go smoke somewhere else, where I’m not around. Doing that would make it painful to be together. If she didn’t quit, it would mean she likes smoking more than she likes me.]

– But, I’d have thought that by the time you got to middle school, some of your friends would have started experimenting with smoking. Didn’t they ever tell you “Have a smoke?”
[It happened, but even though they said things like that, I just refused. Eventually, they got the message that “This guy don’t smoke” and stopped asking. One thing I hated was how everyone hid their smoking. From their parents and teachers. I never saw anything cool about it, at all. Also, everyone who started smoking always said that it tasted horrible, right? I’d ask “Is it good? How’s it taste?” and they’d say something like “I can’t stand the flavour, but I’ll smoke cause it’s cool.” To me, that was incredibly uncool. They were doing that just to look good. That sort of thing isn’t cool, don’t bother with it. So, I’ve never ever wanted to smoke.]

– I understand completely.
[And then, the school toilets would be full of smokers in hiding. Those guys were like “Hey, you smoke too?” to anyone who came in…]

– Ah, so they were the Nobita-kun(1) type of kids, weren’t they?
[Yeah yeah yeah, actually, that’s insulting for Nobita-kun (laughs). Yeah, and wasn’t it mostly the kids no one wanted anything to do with who tried to be cooler by smoking? And then those kids were happy teacher’s pets. But actually, they were smoking in secret. “The hell? You smoke too?” or something. Seeing that sort of scheme didn’t make me think smoking was cool.]

– There aren’t many kids who see things as objectively as you do, tetsu-san.
[That’s not true~, there might be some who take the simple approach about what’s cool. In some ways, I’ve been warped, and I approach things diagonally. There are things the world considers right that I simply don’t agree with, and there are things considered cool that I simply don’t agree with, either. Whatever it is, I start by questioning it. “Is this really cool?” “It it really fun?” I can only respond to things that make it through my personal filter.]

– You’ve been that way since you were quite young, haven’t you?
[Yeah. I don’t like letting people lead me astray. You could say smoking doesn’t count as leading astray because people say it’s alright, but try asking the non-smokers who have to put up with smoke. How many cigarettes does a non-smoker inhale just by being in the same room as smokers? Having the smell cling to your clothes, bags, and hair is bad enough, isn’t it? And it’s dangerous to walk and smoke. Right now, in Japan, the mentality is that the non-smokers should shoulder the burden, but I think it should be the other way around. Smokers should take non-smokers into consideration when they’re going to smoke.]

– You’d like to see more non-smoking areas in Japan, then.
[That’s right. I think that’s the way developed countries are heading. It used to not even be prohibited in hospitals, right? It’s nothing like that in America. A lot of Japanese think they’re acting like Americans by smoking everywhere, but actually they’re ahead in banning it. Right now in America, it seems not smoking is being promoted, so non-smokers are the cool ones. I think I’d like Japan to learn a lesson from America as far as that goes.]

-Interviewer : Harada Sachi
Translated by Natalie Arnold.

1. Nobita-kun is the main character of the incredibly long-running children’s series Doraemon. The basic premise of the show is that Nobita-kun was so incompetent in life that his future descendants sent a robot back in time to help make him into less of a failure. Go back.