So listening to music sightly louder than normal volume on the commute home is intolerable but midnight jaunts to hostess bars to sing terrible enka and pay to feel up women are proper Tuesday night activities for a salaryman with a family? I’ll try to keep the hypocrisy from overflowing too.

With the incredibly low prices, comparatively, for cigarettes and the absolutely overwhelming prevalence of vending machines, convenience stores, old men on the street corner, and high schools in Japan there’s hardly a time when one isn’t easily able to inhale toxic fumes. However, like many odd and obscure hobbies the Japanese enjoy taking up (case in point), some choose to forgo convenience and roll their own. I am going to assume this sign is meant to be strategically placed in and around the areas where their concentration is the highest, tobacco jetsam a stark and disturbing reality for these cigarette renaissance men. At least they don’t get the third degree from a lady at a gas station for buying papers on their way to Canada’s Wonderland…

TOKYO, Japan – April 24, 2009
A joint venture between Hitatchi Chemical Corp., Panasonic Ltd., and JT Inc. was unveiled at the annual “Smoker’s Style” conference in Odaiba today. Addressing the chronic lack of stand ashtrays dotting the best viewpoints in Japan, the new joint-venture developed Super View Lights over a course of three years which is tentatively scheduled for introduction in Q4 2009. Super View Lights combines the latest pico projector and Greenpeacian technology with the smooth and mild taste of a low-tar cigarette to project the most famous vistas, tundra, and fjords the world has to offer. Initially shipping with “The Caves of Cuba” theme, each package of Super View Lights promises a new super view in every pack. MSRP is estimated at approximately ¥5000 per pack. The added aluminum, glass, silica, sulfur, and lithium used in the projector/battery and burned during use has not measurably shortened the already cancerous final years of clinical trial participants, according to spokesperson Kuro Kemuri.

Either the bird or giant cigarette butt caused yet another accident on the streets of Tokyo.
Cloche Bell Jar is a fitting end to the potentially guilty bird; that or suicide attempt in a gas oven.

We’d rather pretend there’s no such thing as mental illness in Japan.

I appreciate the base appeal to human sloth presented in this sign. With the inner-Yamanote line Tokyo JR stations going smoke free and a ban on smoking outside designated areas on sidewalks you’re still going to have that walk ahead of you, sorry Victor.

Not exactly the best way to introduce your petition for promotion at your law firm. I have to commend the parallels to the Wild West’s usage of the word partners and the inclusion of some inconsiderate, tobacco wielding, baseball hat wearing, scruffy looking vigilante. All in all, I believe this to be the cleverest sign meant to reside affixed to a dirty ashtray I’ve seen to date.

I’d be righteously angered that someone put their giant portable ashtray in my desk drawer taking up valuable space regularly used for my obnoxiously oversized novelty pencil. DRINK ME at home to maximize space in tiny Japanese apartments or EAT ME when leaving the house in case of Godzilla attack. Thanks go out to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Can’t see the forest for the trees.

Cigarettes in Japan release amorphous, particulate stalkers who enjoy 80′s wrestling moves a la Macho Man Randy Savage. What happened to friendly blue Robin Williams appearing from inanimate objects?
Stephen King, this has major plot point written all over it.

Those state-issued portable ashtrays are always sooo gaudy. We need a queer-eye for the dying guy to liven up the fashion of the salarymen fuming on the street. What’s Hard Gay doing these days?