Fuming over smoke

The Toyota Motor Corp. has said it will ban all its Japanese employees from smoking by the end of this year, according to a story in the English-language daily, The Japan News, quoting the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

The ban is due to be imposed at its headquarters, and its branch offices and production facilities nationwide.

The company is said to be planning to do away with all indoor smoking areas and persuade its employees to quit smoking.

According to a Teikoku Databank survey in October 2017, less than 20 percent of major companies said they had completely banned smoking in all workplaces. The figure for production facilities is about 10 percent.

But the decision by Toyota is likely to affect other companies’ efforts to introduce total smoking bans.

Toyota has been organizing classes to encourage employees to quit smoking and handing out medication to treat nicotine addiction.

The story said the company had banned smoking during working hours in principle in 2013.

It said that, as a consequence, the smoking rate within the company had fallen from 51 percent in 2004 to 25.4 percent in 2018, but it is likely that a host of other issues were involved; perhaps including the employment over these years of a higher proportion of women, who are less likely than men to smoke.

The story said that Japan’s revised Health Promotion Law would take full effect in April 2020 ahead of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. ‘The law will, in principle, completely ban smoking at workplaces, restaurants and other facilities,’ it said.