Copyright: The Tokyo organizing committee of the Olympic and Paralympic games
Tokyo, Japan is hosting the Olympics in 2020. According to the Japan Times News, Japanese Government is considering curb smoking by enforcing bun at the restaurant and similar public places before 2020 to engage in the free smoking policy by the International Olympics Committee. U.K and Russia who were the hosting countries of the Olympics for the last 2 games also had either banned or some kind of restriction for smoking.
However, there is a high possibility that this policy will face the resistance of Japan Tobacco Inc. (JPI) whose largest shareholder is the Finance Ministry of Japan. Also if the government has decided to apply this new policy, it would cause a huge decrease in the total tax revenue of the country, because the total tax revenue estimated by the ministry in the fiscal year ending in March 2015 is $456 billion and $8.4 billion of them; which is about 2% of the total revenue are from tobacco.
On the other hand, there is a shift in a preference to non-smoking in Japan. JTI announced that the number of smokers in Japan fell to 47% since 1965, when the last Olympics was held in Tokyo. The reason behind this may be the fact that about 7,000 people in the country die annually by smoking and the second hand smoke.
Although this decrease in the revenue may be a big damage for Japanese government, it is a good opportunity for the government to think what is more important between the health of the people or the money and how the future of the country should be as the hosting country of the Olympic games.