Cigarette vending machines to accept driving licenses for age checks

Monday 21st April, 03:08 AM JST

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Latest 15 of 18 Total Comments Show All

zaichik at 08:43 AM JST - 21st April

Where I used to live in Niigata, there was a slot on the beer vending machine, into which you had to insert your driving licence in order to buy beer after 11pm. This isn't exactly new technology....
Scrote at 09:21 AM JST - 21st April

"vending machines with the taspo card function have proved unpopular": maybe the biggest users of the machines were children, who are now unable to buy fags, hence the decline in sales.
nutsagain at 09:46 AM JST - 21st April

With cigarettes priced around 230 yen, don't expect and decrease in the number of smokers soon. Just amazing that the boneheads, otherwise known as the incumbent government hasn't figured out the tax bonanza from at least a doubling of the price. What a dreadful industry with the only ones profiting being the hospitals taking care of the emphysema and heart disease patients. Business looks promising in the next twenty years, that's for sure.
WhatJapanThinks at 09:57 AM JST - 21st April

nuts, 300 or 320 yen is the usual price for cancer sticks, but that's still exceptionally cheap compared to most of the developed world. But I agree, bung on the tax, as the experience from other countries is that people quit at a lower percentage than the rise in tax.

Oh, and my local Daiei gives you a free Hello Kitty mug if you buy a carton of ciggies.
Hikozaemon at 10:34 AM JST - 21st April

The same finance ministry that used to issue guidelines to banks encouraging them to turn off ATMs after 7pm and on Sundays to prevent people withdrawing cash and foster savings, seems quite keen to help the population get access to nicotiene at any time day or night that it sees fit.

The only ministry with any say in how tobacco is sold should be the Health Ministry, and these vending machines should not exist anywhere except bars that have id checks for entry.

If the finance ministry really wants to maintain revenue from tobacco sales, it should focus on increasing the cut it receives through tobacco taxes, rather than helping Japan Tobacco to increase sales.

This is yet another case of a conflict of interest that works to the detriment of the health and people of Japan. I would be interested to know also just how many former Finance Ministry bureaucrats work for Japan Tobacco - you can bet that their protection and support of the company is not based purely on a concern for maintaining national tax coffers...

Peace
jambon at 11:09 AM JST - 21st April

Cop: Show me your driving license, please.

Driver: A vending machine ate it. Cigarette?
blvtzpk at 11:47 AM JST - 21st April

Well, for one thing, kids of yesteryear were far more disciplined. If you forbade them to do something, they listened.

Fantasyland stuff, rjd_jr, pure and simple. Kids were bad then, and still are today. It's the challenge that the onset of adolescence provides you with - react against most everything your elders stand for.

In times gone by, however, there wasn't the same degree of access to to ciggies and beer. I'm sure around a stroll around 1950s era Japan would have seen far fewer of the vending machines that we see today.
sarcasm123 at 12:28 PM JST - 21st April

"It's the challenge that the onset of adolescence provides you with - react against most everything your elders stand for."

But this age is becoming younger and younger, I think. It might have been at age 20 in the past, an age at which smoking is legal.

"In times gone by, however, there wasn't the same degree of access to to ciggies and beer. I'm sure around a stroll around 1950s era Japan would have seen far fewer of the vending machines that we see today."

Are those times you are refering to as those when there was a saying (at least in my country) like: "You're not a man if you don't smoke" ?
fireant at 01:31 PM JST - 21st April

except bars that have id checks for entry.

Bars have id checks? In Japan? Where? Every year you see reports of a teacher arrested for inappropriately touching a student While In a Bar celebrating the end of the year with his class.

There was a porno magazine vending machine near a junior high school where I used to live and the PTA eventually asked the vendor to get rid of the machine. Couldn't. It was their best performing machine.
roughneck at 01:44 PM JST - 21st April

The new type of vending machine, to be approved by the ministry, can verify a cigarette buyer’s birth date when a driving license is inserted in it

And who will make sure that it won't read anything else from the driving license! Who will see that the vending machine companies won't be collect these and make a data base of people's info including their buying habit?
Hikozaemon at 02:27 PM JST - 21st April

My problem with this and the Taspo is that it still allows kids to go and by smokes for their dads, who will just give them the card - and when they do, what is there to stop the kids buying an extra pack for themselves? If people want the convenience of buying cigarettes in an unsupervised outdoor vending machine, I think that we should be talking about using cards with integrated IC chips containing retina or fingerprint information to verify that the person using the card is the person on it. Having kids buy smokes for their parents is still illegal, and teaching them the habit.

Still, it is unbelievable that the ministry of finance is doing this out of concern for the lack of sales from ID enabled vending machines. That implies to me that a lot of people using the machines before can't get cards, and yet the only concern about that being shown is the drop in sales.

The finance ministry is too powerful for the Health Ministry to confront on its own - this requires cabinet level intervention, to get the Finance Ministry out of the nicoteine addiction business, and allow the Health Ministry to begin doing what is best for public health for once.

Peace
blvtzpk at 03:03 PM JST - 21st April

sarcasm 123

I was disagreeing with an ealrier poster's claim that "kids of yesteryear were far more disciplined. If you forbade them to do something, they listened" which is nonsense. Kids have been attempting to do things they have been told they shouldn't do by their elders for centuries. When you say to kids "This is something you shouldn't do until you're x years old" a certain percentage of kids will always challenge it.

As for your second point, I don't know what you're getting at. I simply think there's more anonymous technical facility (i.e. vending machines) for people who are supposed to not purchase a product to do so nowadays - the temptation is there for those to be tempted and it's easy to make a purchase. The Taspo cards are a workaround to allow these machines to keep operating while blocking out their use by youth.
Den Den at 07:01 PM JST - 21st April

Can I please borrow your drivers license Dad?

Tax it and ban it in izakiya's, public places etc. It seems to work in Europe, Australia etc.
DXXJP at 07:18 PM JST - 21st April

Well for one they can just stop by the obasan and get them on the way to school. Infact I send my daughter to the corner 7/11 to buy them for me. So whats this going to accomplish. NOT A DAMN THING. It didnt when they stopped the machines at 11 and it wont with a card.
Speed at 08:59 PM JST - 21st April

When I was a kid, here in Japan, my parents used to send me to the store to buy cigs and beer for them. This was from when I was in pre-school to well into elementary school.

It wasn't as if it was harder to get back 20-30 years ago because there were less vending machines around. Stores often sold smokes and beer to kids who claimed they were buying it for their parents (which was often the case).

It was a lot less prohibitive than it is now. You never saw any "No (activity/underage)" signs until the last fifteen years here. The whole underage drinking/smoking concern was never really that much of a hang-up here in Japan until recently. That was one of the nice things about Japan that I liked.