A Japanese man has been arrested and had 40 guitars seized after reportedly giving his neighbors insomnia from years of high-volume playing.
The Japan Times reports that Kyoto resident Kazunori Yokoi, 61, has been abusing the volume controls of his amplifiers and CD player for the past seven years. Three neighbors, in their 60s and 80s, are said to have suffered from sleep deprivation. A fourth has reportedly developed tinnitus from the guitarist’s decibel-shattering antics.
Yokoi is said to have received multiple warnings, but the complaints continued, forcing the police into action. Subsequently, an investigation found noise levels measured over 80 decibels in the neighborhood. That's roughly the equivalent to the noise of a blender, a handsaw, or heavy traffic.
The investigation also alleged that Yokoi would face his radio out towards the street and blast tunes around the clock.
Yokoi was arrested on assault charges, and Japanese police seized over 40 guitars from Yokoi’s home. Multiple amps, a CD and radio cassette players were also seized. There’s no mention of amp modelers in the report, so Guitar World is going to go out on a limb and say he might have been a tube amp purist.
One long-suffering neighbor is quoted as saying, “All kinds of sounds were jumbled together all day,” (via Kyodo News). Another said the music he played was hard rock.
According to the police, the 61-year-old guitarist admitted to making the noise but denied that his love of loud had harmed anyone.
Noisy neighbor guitarists can be problematic. Ozzy Osbourne was once famously so fed up with Randy Rhoads’ late-night guitar sessions coming through his hotel room walls, he insisted on fitting a remote control onto his pedalboard so he could power it off from the comfort of his bed.
Perhaps this Kyoto neighborhood could learn something from that...
