Each working day, as the sun rises, the streets and laneways of Kudus fill with tens of thousands of women. On bikes and buses, by foot and on the back of motorcycles, many resplendent in their company-issue hairnets, they head to work, some to vast, modern warehouses, others to old buildings no larger than a small house.
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This is ''Kota Kretek'' - Kretek City - and the women work in hundreds of cigarette factories in this Central Java hub of tobacco manufacturing.
About 75 per cent of Kudus's population of 800,000 are employed by the cigarette industry, and there are almost a quarter of a million workers - almost all of them women - who handroll kreteks, Indonesia's distinctive clove cigarette.
The women work in pairs, and with astonishing dexterity. Each pair typically makes more than 5000 cigarettes a day, one grabbing fistfuls of tobacco and stuffing it into a wooden rolling machine while the other snips the ends and gathers enough for each packet.
''Yes, I like it. I make many friends and I earn some money,'' says Tumini, 28, who has been working at PT Djarum, one of the country's largest manufacturers, for 10 years. ''For the first two weeks it hurt my fingers, but it is just like playing a guitar. After a couple of weeks you get used to it and it stops hurting.''
Hand-rolled kreteks cost about $1 per packet and are actually cheaper than the machine-made ''white'' cigarettes. The price reflects a concessionary tax regime that highlights the Indonesian government's controversial approach to regulating the industry, where the protection of the 6 million workers directly employed in the industry, and their extremely wealthy bosses, trumps health concerns.
Indonesia is one of the world's last bastions of laissez-faire regulation of tobacco use. Ads still run on TV; the football league is sponsored by a tobacco company, as are pop concerts, and cultural and sporting events, where young women often hand out free packets to anyone with a ticket.
Rates of smoking are rising - up 26 per cent in the past 15 years as women and youngsters take up the habit. One in four boys aged between 13 and 15 now smoke and 70 per cent of men do. Just 5 per cent of women smoke, but that percentage has tripled in the past decade.
The health and economic effects are devastating. More than 400,000 a year die from health-related illnesses, according to the World Health Organisation. Another survey found that Indonesian households with smokers spend more on cigarettes than fish, meat, eggs and milk combined, and four times more than they outlay on education.
Tax from cigarettes brings in $6.2 billion for the government, about 8.5 per cent of revenue, but, says Ruli Mustafa of the anti-smoking group Combat, the health costs each year are ''far bigger'', more than $21 billion by one estimate. In Kudus, though, where the streets are festooned with banners from smoking companies, many argue that kreteks, the choice of 88 per cent of smokers, are in fact healthy. Local legend has it that Camhari, the Kudus native who invented kretek, was cured of asthma after he added cloves to tobacco.
''It's common knowledge that cloves are a good herbal remedy,'' says Handojo Setyo, the PR man for PT Djarum. ''Kreteks are different from other cigarettes and cigars because of the cloves. There is research that shows clove oil can cure HIV and AIDS.
''Have you ever found anyone who has HIV and AIDS and smokes kretek? We have been looking and we can't find one.''
It's bunkum, of course. Kreteks are worse than normal cigarettes. Tar and nicotine levels, which are not restricted in Indonesia, are twice as high in kreteks than the maximum allowed in Australia. Yet Indonesia is one of the last countries where advocates who still insist on the health benefits of cigarettes are given airtime.
This week Metro TV, one of the country's major news channels, ran a half hour program devoted to the ''divine cigarette'', the invention of the nanochemist Greta Zahar, which claims not only to have eliminated the toxins in cigarettes but to contain properties that can cure various maladies from liver cancer to autism.
The host conducted a lengthy interview with two Indonesian scientists supportive of Ms Zahar's work as footage of a smiling Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, meeting tobacco farmers was shown on a loop. No countervailing views were sought.
Kudus does have an anti-smoking campaigner, of a type.
Bambang Kismanu is the head of the health department office in Kudus and has a budget of about $50,000 a year to encourage people to give up cigarettes. Each school in the regency now has no-smoking signs and teachers have mostly stopped lighting up in the playground, he says. Efforts are concentrated on fourth and fifth graders, amid alarming evidence of pre-teens taking up smoking.
''We are trying to get buildings to become non-smoking areas, but we have only two so far,'' Bambang says. ''That's here [at the health department office] and at the manpower ministry.''
As we talk I spy a dirty ashtray in his office. ''You smoke?''
''No, it is just for guests. I've given up,'' Bambang replies.
We say our goodbyes, but I return a few minutes later to use the bathroom, surprising Bambang. The portly health chief is drawing deeply on a kretek, chatting away with a group of his staff, all of them smoking at their desks.
