Vending machines in Japan are as commonplace as temples, bicycles, and karaoke booths.
It’s not uncommon to see a street lined with a dozen or more machines selling products ranging from cold and hot drinks to flowers or rice. And almost none of these vending machines are vandalized or non-functional. According to the Vending Machine Manufacturers Association, Japan has one vending machine for every 23 people.
Here are some pictures of the
cigarette vending machines.
These machines will generally carry a wide variety of
cigarettes, many of which are American brands, both popular and obscure. You will also come across some brands you probably never knew existed. Some vending machines have a girl outside promoting some of the products.
According to statistics, 51% of adult men
smoke in Japan, which is down from the number of male
smokers in the 1980s.
Smoking among women was once considered taboo, but has now risen to nearly 10% in the last decade.
A survey in the early 1990s indicated that 44% of Japanese physicians were
smokers. And with 500,000
cigarette vending machines the young could easily purchase
cigarettes.
Smoking is legally prohibited until 20 years of age. The only method of prevention related to
cigarette vending machines was that they were turned off between 11:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M. Japan has some of the weakest anti-tobacco laws. There are very few public areas that are smoke-free.
Nowadays Japanese vending machines use face recognition to scan for wrinkles and saggy skin before authenticating
cigarette purchases. But they're so easy to circumvent that even a kid can do it. Turns out the cameras will authenticate "a 15-centimeter (6-inch) wide magazine photo of a man who looked to be in his 50s." Smaller clippings work too as demonstrated by a successful
cigarette vend using a 3-inch photo of a woman in her 30s -- a 1-inch wide photo failed, however. Still, only 4,000 of Japan's 570,000
cigarette vending machines feature the cams and these are due for a software update in response to the flaw -- the rest use RFID readers to check the
smoker's Taspo age-verification card. Nevertheless, we don't think it's much of a stretch to predict that this system, like that of DRM controlled music, is destined to fail.
