Click on Japan’s Dorozoku website, and a map pockmarked with clusters of orange and yellow circles will appear—each one representing a noisy resident. Invented by a work-from-home software developer in 2016, the digital map allows users to pinpoint spots of sonic disturbance, from squawking children to chatty couples. It serves as a warning to noise-phobes: Enter these zones at your peril.¹

The map is controversial in Japan, where its exposure of people’s daily hubbub is seen as an anonymous shaming ritual. But the Dorozoku platform reveals a silent frustration for unwanted sounds, a discontent that expands out to the cacophony of modernity itself—the whirring cranes that erect the skyline at 5 a.m., the grating thrum of cars whipping down the highway.

In any collective environm...