Smoke Ring: From American Tobacco to Japanese Data

This article explores the political, legal, and social history of the 1981 “Japanese Smokers’ Wives Study.” This large-scale cohort study, led by Takeshi Hirayama, chief epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute in Tokyo, found that the nonsmoking wives of smokers were themselves at greater risk for developing lung cancer. The study was successfully used by American anti-tobacco activists to regulate indoor smoking during the 1980s. Taking a transnational approach, the article explores the complex, multilayered relationship between American tobacco production, Japanese epidemiology, and American tobacco restriction. It argues that smoking and anti-smoking in the United States and Japan have produced each other through flows of tobacco and epidemiological data. In the postwar era, Japanese cigarettes were increasingly filled with American-grown tobacco as part of aid packages, or sold to the Japanese Tobacco Monopoly. The subject population of the study was made, in part, by American tobacco producers. Meanwhile Americans who lived under an expanding umbrella of tobacco ordinances in the 1980s were made by Japanese tobacco consumers. The circulation of tobacco from American farms to Japanese bodies, from leaf to epidemiological data, is a window into the coproduction of science and capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century.