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 50 Close Knit Close Knit: Meet the weavers keeping traditional Egyptian tapestrymaking alive. Arts & Culture Issue 50 The Old Gays Inside a Californian TikTok “content house” of a very different stripe. Arts & Culture Issue 50 New Roots The Palestinian art and agriculture collective sowing seeds of community. Arts & Culture Issue 50 Angela Trimbur An all-out tour de force. Arts & Culture Issue 50 Peace & Quiet In the UK, a centuries-old Quaker meeting house encourages quiet reflection.
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