WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This article examines the rapid increase in noise, defined as unwanted sound, and ordinary people’s reactions to it in Germany and Japan around 1900, when the world was not yet fully globalized in a modern sense. While previous historical studies of noise in the two countries have explored how urban noise became a major issue and how this shift often led to anti-noise initiatives, such as Theodor Lessing’s Anti-Noise Society (Antilärmverein) in Germany, they have paid little attention to connecting ordinary people’s experiences of noise in those two countries from a global perspective. This article argues that German and Japanese publics developed parallel anti-noise strategies to maintain normalcy in daily life. In both countries, new experiences of noise spurred by industrialization and urbanization led to discontinuity in daily life. Mushrooming factories, electric trains, and automobiles generated new forms of mechanical noise and began to disrupt the existing lifestyle of ordinary people. With industrial and urban noise emerging as a global challenge for both countries, ordinary Germans and Japanese, despite the absence of direct contact or knowledge of each other, responded to noise nuisance in strikingly similar ways. Specifically, they negotiated with their neighbors, private companies, and local authorities through informal agreements, collective petitions, and lawsuits. At the heart of these actions was their desire to preserve the most fundamental conditions of life: health and livelihood. Overall, this coeval establishment of daily frameworks for understanding noise serves as a case study of how Germany and Japan, not as isolated states but as participants in an emergent global community, responded to common challenges at the turn of the century. More broadly, this study suggests that focusing on hitherto neglected historical actors allows us to reflect on the prevalent concepts of connection and disconnection in global history.