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. This story is from Kinfolk Issue Forty-Seven Buy Now Related Stories Arts & Culture Issue 35 Level Up What can video games teach us about reality? Arts & Culture Issue 47 Alice Sheppard On dance as a channel to commune with the body—even when it hurts. Arts & Culture Issue 47 Dr. Woo Meet the tattoo artist who's inked LA. Arts & Culture Issue 47 Walt Odets The author and clinical psychologist on why self-acceptance is the key to a gay man's well-being. Arts & Culture Fashion Issue 47 A Picture of Health Xiaopeng Yuan photographs the world’s weirdest wellness cures. Arts & Culture Issue 47 Chani Nicholas and Sonya Passi Inside the astrology company on a mission to prove workplace well-being is more than a corporate tagline.
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