In 1996, the Environment Ministry unveiled a list of designated places and traditions around the country that demanded appreciation not for how they looked, but how they sounded.
The selections in "100 Soundscapes of Japan" may not have been terribly adventurous — bird songs, temple bells, gurgling rivers — but the list's mere existence was notable. Even now, you'd have to go all the way to Finland to find anything comparable.
Japan's relationship with sound is certainly unusual. While walking the 88-temple pilgrimage of Shikoku, Neil Cantwell, a British musician, writer and sometime filmmaker, recalls staying with a woman who "just talked for hours about how much she loved the sound of the rain on the leaves." In Japan, he says, sound "provides this really deep inspiration for a lot of people I've met, which I just haven't encountered anywhere else."