Short Abstract

This paper examines how noise as “global knowledge” took shape across Japan and Germany around 1900 through the shared challenges of global industrialization and urbanization, the development of medical knowledge of neurasthenia, and the formation of ideas of East and West.

Long Abstract

This paper traces how Japan played a role in making knowledge of noise through its global engagement with the rest of the world around 1900, particularly with Germany. It argues that the formation of noise as global knowledge across the two countries occurred at the intersection of three global developments at that time: industrialization and urbanization, the development of medical knowledge of neurasthenia, and encounters and comparisons between East and West. To examine this transformation, this paper first discusses industrialization and urbanization as major preconditions for urban and mechanical noise. A rapid increase in factory machines, trains, and cars emerged as a global challenge that Japan and Germany faced together at the turn of the twentieth century. These brand-new products of industrialization and urbanization led excessive noise to become part of daily life. The second part of the paper explores the ways in which scientists responded to this change. The influx of noise in industrialized countries across the globe transformed human senses, too. The increase in external acoustic stimuli led contemporary intellectuals to devise conceptual frameworks to explain the significance and effects of noise. Among these, neurasthenia provided Japanese and German scientists with a useful framework for attributing the prevalence of noise to the development of modern civilization and for understanding noise’s impact on the human nerve system, labor efficiency, and health. The last part of this paper traces how the idea of noise was embedded in the shaping of imaginary “others” through ideas of East and West. The idea of noise served as a window through which the Japanese and German publics viewed other countries across the border. More specifically, they used noise as a means of criticizing their own cultures and admiring others. On the one hand, noise symbolized the manifestation of the pathology of German and European civilization. On the other, Japan’s inability to control noise meant that it was less civilized than Western countries. By investigating this multi-layered process of making knowledge of noise, this paper proposes a more nuanced understanding of how Japan and Germany were “connected” on different levels beyond diplomatic relationships around 1900.