Meiwaku: The Threat to Japanese Harmony
Published in
4 min readMar 13, 2024
In February 2021, a Japanese website raised criticism: its principle was that users could submit meiwaku noise information about their neighborhood. Most of the time, users complained about the sounds of children playing, and the word “meiwaku” was heavily used in the comments.
“Meiwaku” can be translated in several ways: trouble, annoyance, annoying. In Japanese, spam mail is called meiwaku mail, and the same term applies to spam phone calls. The word’s meaning is strong, and I believe “nuisance” is probably the closest word in English for meiwaku.
