Street food hot spot wants to be cleaner, but it might just be pushing the smoke down the street.

A new facility opened last Thursday in Dotombori, the Osaka canal district that’s the biggest tourism draw in the heart of central Japan’s largest city. It isn’t a new restaurant, shopping center, or manzai comedy venue, though. Instead, it’s a designated smoking area.

Last year, the Osaka Minami-Dotonbori Overtourism Countermeasures Promotion Council came to the conclusion that public service announcements played from speakers in the neighborhood had proven ineffective in sufficiently discouraging people from smoking while walking along Dotonbori’s streets and leaving cigarette butts behind on the ground. With Dotonbori boasting one of Japan’s most vibrant street food scenes, the members of the council are keen to keep the place clean, and so they partnered with telecommunications company NTT Docomo to establish Dotonbori’s first designated outdoor smoking area, with the hope that by setting aside an area as OK to smoke in, fewer people will smoke or litter outside of its boundaries. NTT provided remote security camera equipment so that the unstaffed facility can be monitored from afar.

▼ Osaka Municipal Environment Director Yoshitaka Ikeda, Osaka Minami-Dotonbori Overtourism Countermeasures Promotion Council Chairman Katsuya Kamiyama, and NTT representative Tomoyuki Okuda at the facility’s opening ceremony

It’s worth noting that while the loanword “overtourism” is often used these days in Japan to discuss negative effects of inbound international, and littered cigarette butts have been a frequent complaint in areas where they are occurring, the Osaka Minami-Dotonbori Overtourism Countermeasures Promotion Council hasn’t singled out foreign tourists in its announcement of the smoking area’s opening, referencing only the “30 million tourists, including inbound [foreign travelers]” that visit Dotonbori annually.

The smoking area is located on the south side of the Tazaemonbashi Bridge, one bridge east of the famous Ebisubashi Bridge that’s the major gathering point for sightseers in Dotonbori.

▼ Tazaemonbashi Bridge

However, establishing a smoking area isn’t necessarily a perfect solution to the issues the council is trying to address. As shown in the photos above, the smoking area is not enclosed, and it’s not even clear whether or not it has a roof. That means that smoke is going to drift out of it, especially if/when a dense concentration of smokers gathers. What’s more, while Tazaemonbashi isn’t used by as many people or have as many close-proximity shops and restaurants as Ebisubashi, it’s not like Tazaemonbashi is some secluded waterway crossing where introducing regular clouds of smoke isn’t going to bother anyone who doesn’t have a nicotine addiction of their own.

▼ Tazaemonbashi Bridge

Somewhat like the new ordinance requiring more trash cans in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood, the Dotonbori smoking area seems to be a lesser-of-two-evils attempt to solve a problem, so we’ll have to wait and see whether the concession ends up improving the situation overall.

Source, images: PR Times
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