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Tobacco smoking spread from the Portuguese colony of Macaou. In 1638 the Ming emperor also decreed any person trafficking in tobacco to be decapitated but the decree proved ineffectual as smoking spread within the court. A second prohibition was issued in 1641. In 1796 opium is banned again and once more in 1800, at penalty of death. Yet even executions had no great effect on the number of users. Imports increased greatly in the following decades as foreign trading houses seized on the opportunity by growing or purchasing ample supplies in Bengal, British-India and shipping the opium to Canton, South China. In 1839 troops of the Chinese emperor attacked British traders operating near Canton and the 1st Opium War began, in which China was defeated in 1843. The problem for the Chinese emperor was not that some of his subjects could not let go of a substance, but that this enriched foreign "barbarians", who had the power to dictate the terms of the trade while the emperor was not allowed to put a halt to the trade, as he had also tried (unsuccessfully) with tobacco. China had to permit the importation of opium, and later it also permitted its cultivation until a nationalist backlash stopped it again in 1906. Until after World War II foreign powers enjoyed privileged status in China. As a direct response to China's defeat and the "unequal treaties" it was forced to sign, the Tokugawa shogunate banned opium in 1846 and strictly enforced the law. It appears that the prime motivation was a determination that Japan should not follow in China's footsteps. One did not want to repeat China's example.
After War War I Japan inherited German possessions in China and acquired
control of lands in Manchuria from Russia which had lost a war with Japan
in 1903. Opium smuggling
The strict controls on opium in Japan from the first Opium War onwards and the different Japanese policies on opium in Japan on one hand and Taiwan and China on the other indicate that this was never seen as a strictly moral or medical problem, but a colonial power problem. Japan emulated China's position towards western powers, but in itself treated China like those western powers.
Opium, morphine and heroin 
Opiates have long been used medically. Opium, its active ingredient morphine and its pharmaceutical derivative heroin were used as effective pain killers, for treatment of cough and against diarrhea. Though opiates have a high potential for habituation and addiction and though injecting black market heroin is pretty dangerous, chronic use of pharmaceutically pure morphine or heroin is actually no more harmful than chronic insulin use by a diabetic. It's certainly much less harmful than chronic alcoholism. Nevertheless, Japanese doctors are very reluctant to prescribe morphine and often leave patients in severe pain out of the largely mistaken fear of addicting patients: Opiates do tend to cause physical addiction if used daily for a few weeks, but few patients who take them for pain have problems quitting once they've recovered from the illness or injury that caused the pain.
The relative low popularity of opiates is not only testament to the yakuza's efforts to effectively control the black drug markets, it is also the product of an anti-opium campaign that goes back more than a century. Last but not least it also reflects the Japanese value system that esteems "gaman dekiru", a tenacious endurance of all things unpleasant, including pain. Japanese society honors those who have a high tolerance for pain (in an almost sado-masochist way) and it condemns those who abuse a pharmaceutical substance that kills pain.
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