VOX POPULI: Has climate change brought a 'silent summer' to Japan?

While walking along a main street one brutally hot afternoon, I decided to turn onto a side street, hoping to find some shade.

I was the only person walking.

A small children’s playground nearby was totally deserted, its slide shockingly hot to the touch.

The only sound I heard was the droning of cicadas. I suddenly felt creeped out, all alone in the middle of a city.

“It’s too hot for humans to be outside. This is turning into our ‘Silent Summer,’” noted Koji Nagahata, a Fukushima University professor and researcher of soundscapes, which are defined as “acoustic environments as perceived in social and cultural contexts.”

According to Nagahata, the effects of global warming are evident in today’s acoustic environment.

About 30 years ago, he began researching sound-related expressions that were used in haiku from the Edo Period (1603-1867) to the early 1990s.

Upon analyzing them statistically, he determined that Japan’s soundscapes had changed, as evidenced by a decrease in haiku that focused on sounds of nature—such as birdcalls and rain patter—while poems containing sounds heard in daily life—like human voices and transportation noise—grew more prominent.

Nagahata also found that the changes were slow and gradual from the Edo Period, but increased rapidly from the 1980s on.

He believed this was not just due to changes in the environment, but probably also to some “dulling sensitivity to sound” in the public at large.

In this connection, he pointed out the fact that nowadays, many people can identify the sound made by “higurashi” (evening cicadas), but not of any other cicadas.

In 1962, U.S. scientist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) documented the environmental pollution caused by pesticides in her seminal work “Silent Spring.” In a world where birds stopped singing, “all is silent” in the woods and a pond, she wrote.

More than 60 years later today, has global warming brought us a “new silence”?

Straining my ears in the back street, I heard the rumble of outdoor units of air conditioners.

—The Asahi Shimbun, Aug. 24

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.