Japan’s 100 Soundscapes at 30: Always Be Recording

Working in tech is not always fun, so I found myself with some unusually free time. Thanks to some deals out of LAX, I decided that in a few days I’ll be heading back to Japan with a bag full of my usual cameras and field recording equipment.

Planning for field recording is a tricky process, one that deserves an article of its own, and one I have yet to really fully grasp. So I’ve been taking a loose approach to planning: looking for interesting places to record, things specific to October, festivals, trains, temples, wildlife, and the general ambience that gives that sense of place and time.

During that research I came across a project I somehow had never encountered before: Japan’s 100 Soundscapes of Japan, selected in 1996.

But like any government project, there are some wild tales of intrigue and betrayal attached to it, things maybe I’ll write more about later. For today I am going to cover the idea behind it, and how I think it’s more relevant than ever in this era of fast-paced social media.

What does a place sound like?

In 1996, Japan’s Environment Agency asked people around the country to nominate sounds and sound environments they felt were worth preserving.

It received 738 nominations and eventually selected 100.

The results ranged from the natural, like birds, insects, and rivers, to the man-made: temple bells, festivals, trains, traditional industries, and other sounds closely associated with particular places. The idea was not simply to identify pleasant noises. The selections were meant to represent soundscapes that communities associated with their local identity, in perhaps the same way a dialect or a local baked good would be.

If you were to translate the list a bit literally, it calls out the sounds of a cricket.

But with the full translation, it’s not the species, or the time of year, or any of that alone. It is the combination of autumn insects calling from the banks of the Yodo River while Osaka hums behind them.

The sound exists in a place, at a time, and in relation to everything surrounding it.

That specific identity is what makes them unique and vulnerable, and I think where I connected to the list.

I grew up on a cattle farm, next to a highway, down the street from a rod & gun club. It’s that combination of things that can tell me quite readily, when I wake up in a bed back there, that I am home rather than in any of the other places I’ve been lucky enough to travel.

Thirty years is a long time for a sound

A follow-up survey published in 2018 found that about 92 percent of respondents said their designated soundscapes could still be experienced.

Among the sounds reported lost were frog calls, a suikinkutsu water feature, wind moving through pines, and part of a forest railway soundscape. Another selection included the distinctive creaking of the hand-operated oar on the Yagiri ferry. The ferry still exists, but it is no longer normally driven that way.

These were all famous soundscapes. They were on the list, after all, so I went searching to try and hear what they sounded like while they were still around, especially the ferry. But to my surprise, they were not super easy to find.

In 2026, YouTube says more than 20 million videos are uploaded every day. Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps, and our camera rolls contain an almost incomprehensible visual record of the world around us.

That is a staggering amount of information.

But these supposedly famous sounds were still really hard to find and listen to.

We are extraordinarily good at visually documenting places, and we are incredibly lucky with just how easy it is to do today.

A famous temple may have millions of photographs online. A street corner, looking at you Shibuya scramble, might appear on Instagram, Google Street View, travel blogs, YouTube, and tens of thousands of phones.

Even completely ordinary places are photographed constantly.

But how many people stop for ten minutes and record what that same place sounds like?

A neighborhood can have an enormous visual archive and almost no sonic archive at all.

Then something changes.

A railway closes. A highway opens. Traffic patterns change. Logging changes the wind patterns down a slope. A species stops appearing. A shop replaces its door chime. A festival changes route. A bell stops ringing. A field becomes a housing development.

While it may be a byproduct of that change, the sound that came along with it is gone, supplanted with something different.

Field recording is also documentation

I tend to think of field recording as a creative activity. I’ve posted about that a number of times on here. It is lovingly technical, but still creative.

Sometimes I want a lovely recording. Sometimes I’m interested in playing with mics and seeing how a different stereo technique changes a recording. Sometimes I simply hear a fun door squeak and want to capture it.

But the 100 Soundscapes project is a reminder that field recording can also be something much simpler:

evidence of how a place sounded at a particular moment in time.

That recording does not have to be exotic.

In fact, the mundane recordings may eventually become the most interesting ones. The things we, as individuals, hear every day are precisely the things we are least likely to think need recording.

Japan’s project was unusually forward-looking, in the style of Schafer and crew, because it treated sound as part of cultural and environmental identity at a national scale. The designation itself offered no legal protection. Its purpose was largely to encourage awareness and local preservation efforts.

Thirty years later, that makes the surviving recordings and documentation even more valuable.

Going to listen

To bring this closer to home, FreeToUseSounds posted a video where they recorded a funicular and a chairlift outside of Osaka during the amazing colors of autumn. Now, for any of you that know me, you know that both of these things are just absolute catnip for me. How could someone not love a funicular?

So, while I was planning a fall trip there in 2025, I thought this could be a really neat thing to go and record myself, in my own way. I started researching it and, well, it turns out the whole line to that mountain peak had closed. So that video on YouTube is now one of the best records of the place and facilities.

So, wrapping up, I’m not going to Japan to check all 100 entries off a list.

But I’ll probably grab a few while I wander around.

Maybe what I need to remind myself is that sometimes the noble recording is the mundane one.

2026 is a crazy year already, and things will likely change quickly in the near future. So while I may not get Godzilla rising from Tokyo Bay, maybe just a crossing or a doorbell chime is worth keeping on my hard drive.

What sound would disappear from your home?

None of us need a government list to do this.

Think about where you live.

What can you hear there today that someone might not hear 20 or 30 years from now?

It might be wildlife.

It might be machinery.

It might be a train, a bell, a crossing signal, a market, a sporting event, a local festival, or an elderly neighbor using a tool nobody else uses anymore.

It may be something so ordinary that recording it feels pointless.

Record it anyway.

Take a recorder, a microphone, or even your phone and give the place a few uninterrupted minutes, and just listen while you do.

Take some notes about where you were and when you recorded it, and ideally save those notes somewhere alongside the recording. FieldLog.net works pretty well for that.

We already have an enormous photographic record of the world around us.

Our sonic record is much thinner. So, please share too.

Japan asked people in 1996 which sounds they wanted to preserve. Thirty years later, some of those sounds are already gone.

That seems like a good reason to start listening to our own surroundings a little more carefully.