Japanoise is the label applied, mostly outside Japan, to the country’s extreme noise music of the 1980s and 1990s: Merzbow in Tokyo, Hijokaidan, Hanatarash, Masonna, Incapacitants, Violent Onsen Geisha and many others, a large number of them based in Osaka or around the Kyoto venue Drugstore. The anthropologist David Novak traced how the word arose in North America in the 1990s, when college radio DJs and collectors grouped the cassettes and CDs arriving from Japan under one heading, a name many of the musicians themselves disliked.
In his 2013 book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation, published by Duke University Press, Novak describes the scene as a feedback loop between Japanese performers and overseas listeners, sustained by cassettes and small labels. Noise is not drone, but the two meet constantly: walls of sustained distortion behave like drones, and the static mass later pursued by harsh noise wall makes the border between them porous.