Kyoto man arrested after seven years of loud guitar and radio noise

Kyoto Prefectural Police arrested Kazunori Yokoi, a 61-year-old unemployed resident of Nishikyo Ward in Kyoto City, on July 23 on suspicion of assault after neighbors said loud guitar playing and radio noise from his home had gone on for about seven years. The complaint turned a private practice setup into a neighborhood flashpoint, with reports saying the sound sometimes continued day and night and reached roughly 80 decibels.

The alleged fallout was not just annoyance. At least four neighboring residents reportedly developed insomnia and depression, and one Japanese report said the harm included sleep disorders and hearing problems. Another described the noise at times as comparable to the sound level inside a subway car, a striking comparison for a residential street where the argument appears to have been less about taste in music than about endurance.

The arrest drew viral attention online because the alleged noise had continued for more than seven years before police action was taken. That long run gave the case a different shape from the usual neighbor complaint: this was not a single late-night amp mistake or a one-off jam session, but a prolonged dispute in densely packed urban housing, where guitar volume and radio bleed can become impossible to ignore.

Japan has seen a noise case reach court before. In 2006, Miyoko Kawahara was sentenced to 20 months in prison after blasting rock music at a neighbor for more than two years, and reports said the victim suffered insomnia and headaches. The comparison has made the Kyoto case especially resonant among guitar players, because it lands on a familiar fault line between home practice and everyone else living through it.

For electric guitar players, the details are a hard reminder that amp volume, timing and isolation matter as much as tone. A home rig that feels manageable inside one room can become a block-wide problem once it runs for hours, and in Kyoto the alleged noise did not just irritate neighbors, it ended with an arrest.