Court Orders Man to Pay Over Noisy Toddler’s Footsteps
Here’s a great example of how to deal with annoyingly loud neighbors:
A Tokyo court has ordered the father of a toddler to pay 360,000 yen in compensation to a neighbor after it ruled that the infant’s loud footsteps constituted noise pollution.
“The footsteps surpassed tolerable limits,” Yasushi Nakamura, judge at the Tokyo District Court, said in handing down the ruling.
The plaintiff, who lives in Tokyo’s Itabashi-ku, filed a suit against the father demanding 2.4 million yen in damages because of disturbances caused by the loud footsteps of the toddler who moved into the second floor of the same condo complex around April 2004. His wife also suffered from insomnia because of the noise.
The plaintiff had complained about the annoying sound to the father of the 3-to-4-year-old toddler, but the father ignored him. The plaintiff then placed a noise meter in his home and recorded that the footsteps upstairs measured 50 to 65 decibels.
How loud is that? Somewhere between the loudness of moderate rainfall and a vacuum cleaner, according to the ASHA.
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Kid bashing, Shame on you…If you dont like noise get out of the city, “the dad ignored him” you mean the kid is being a kid, a regular toddler. Its hard for kids to understand who likes hearing their own footsteps that it is disturbing the probably cant have children or anti children or just decided to be selfish and not to have children for a career or have a dog and call it a baby people who live downstairs. They should sue the owner, designer of the crappy and cheaply made building.
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Maybe for a second offense they’ll judge that the toddler should have his feet chopped off – that would silence the noisy little scofflaw.
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While I agree it seems like a harsh overreaction, the parents really should let the kid tire himself out outside at a park or something, not running around in an apartment. But the building seems like it obviously needs better insulation if a toddler can bother someone that much.
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I wish i could get in one of these “unfortunate” situations, so that i can make a little money.
Whatever happened to “Life’s not Fair”?
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Can I sue those guys with the megaphones outside of my house? Surely, their sound pollution is much louder. I wanna get the sweet potato guy too.
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It’s difficult to reach a valid conclusion based on the details provided in the article alone. On one end, if this was only an occasional occurrence, then I think the people living below should have pursued other avenues to arrive at a better solution (assuming they didn’t) or just accepted it.
However, on the other end – as a person who lives below a very noisy and belligerent family – I definitely understand how constant noise can be a huge distraction and ultimately become a huge detriment to your daily life.
If the family on the second floor was only asked once to try and keep things down, that’s one thing. If they were asked multiple times and made no attempts to better the situation, then there’s a big problem. Also, the fact that this noise supposedly caused insomnia seems to hint that this wasn’t just during the normal daytime hours, but late into the evening as well. Either way, not nearly enough details.
And yes, I realize toddlers have lots of energy and aren’t old enough to actually understand what’s going on here (they’re basically a giant id with arms and legs), and that should definitely be factored into this equation. But there is a thin line between letting a kid be a kid and being grossly inconsiderate to those around you.
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