Seven Stars Original (14, soft pack)

セブンスター launched on 1 February 1969 with a distinction no other Japanese cigarette could claim at the time: the first in the country to use a charcoal filter. The blend is what makes it Japanese rather than merely Japanese-sold — a domestic blend, 国産葉=centered, built mainly on leaf grown in Japan. It is the closest thing the country has to a national cigarette.

That blend is also the reason the brand is treated as a domestic product at all. A separate Seven Stars line, Mild Seven, launched in 1977 as an American-blend alternative and now exists as Meevius. The domestic Seven Stars was never derived from it.

Its commercial history is unusually long for a brand of its age. The soft pack was Japan’s best-selling cigarette outright from 1975 to 1977, lost the position to the Mild Seven derivatives for three decades, then took it back in the first quarter of 2008 and held it through 2016. JT has consistently described it as one of its core brands.

Two details survive from 1969 essentially unchanged. The filter is charcoal, which was the selling point at launch and is still printed on the pack. And the 星小紋 — the small repeated star pattern that gives the brand its name — has never been substantially redesigned. The pack’s proportions changed when the cigarette went from 80 mm to 85 mm king size in 1993, and the box format arrived in 1995, but the pattern did not.

It is sold under a small family of nicknames: セッタ, セスタ, セッター, ブンタ, and simply 七つ星, seven stars. The menthol variants have their own, セタメン.

What the numbers say

Spec	Value
Tobacco type	Blended, domestic leaf-centred (国産葉中心)
Tar	14 mg
Nicotine	1.2 mg
Carbon monoxide	not published
Length	85 mm (king size; 80 mm until 1993)
Format	Soft pack, charcoal filter
Packs per carton	not published
Pack price	¥600 JPY
Released	1 February 1969

JT publishes no carbon monoxide figure for any Seven Stars variant, so it is recorded as unknown rather than inferred. The 14 mg yield is high by the standards of a filtered cigarette, and it is the tar figure the export-market version of this brand is usually confused for — the widely circulated “Seven Stars 12” is the same cigarette as sold outside Japan.

Rating

None yet. All three axes are zero, which the site reads as “not rated” rather than as a score of nought, so the rankings table shows a dash until somebody writes them.

Sources

• Tar, nicotine, count, price, release dates — JT Seven Stars family
• Blend, formats, availability channel, withdrawal dates, discontinued SKUs, nicknames, sales history — Japanese Wikipedia: セブンスター