Cash machines, elevators and escalators that talk. Jingles in department stores, train stations, supermarkets and shopping arcades. Loud speaker warnings about the dangers of riding on the bus or train, overlayed by sirens, car horns, traffic and pedestrians. “For a culture that places a high value on quiet,” US journalist Daniel Krieger once wrote, “Japan can get pretty noisy sometimes.”
Japanese anti-noise campaigner Yoshimichi Nakajima talks about people being “pickled in noise”. He argues that at the core of his nation’s relationship with noise pollution lies passivity and ignorance. People in Japan pay no mind to the noise, he says – they barely notice it.
If noise pollution is a contemporary problem, however, quite how to measure, control and even define it has long been a subject of debate in Japan. My research shows that this was particularly evident in debates over the language used to discuss the urban soundscape in the 1920s and 1930s.
