You go to Japan. You gotta do some karaoke. It’s an unwritten law. After all, Japan is the home of it (depending on who you speak to) and nowhere else in the world quite revels in it like Japan. Whilst the full on karaoke experience in the Western word is rather expensive and only of real value if you go with lots of people – in Japan it’s affordable and won’t burn holes in your pockets. Well…if you ease up on the food and drinks it won’t anyway. Everybody from school kids, to salary men, to part timers can just wander  into a Big echo to drop some karaoke un-planned and scrape together some Yen to belt their Nihongo classics, the Oricon’s chart toppers and the Eigo hits.

The first time my friends and I went to karaoke was with a couple of girls who were living in the same apartment complex as us. I was a bit hesitant to go at first. I’m no singer and I get really nervous when put on the spot in front of an audience. But as soon as the mic was in my hand and I chose my song, I was off! And it seemed everybody else was too. There was no stopping anybody! The hits (and questionable song choices) rolled out, the food got devoured and pitchers of beer got roped into our karaoke forfeit drinking games which resulted in 2 people feeling sick, one person shocking everybody with their drinking ability (yours truly!) and two broken glasses. None of us thought Karaoke could be much more eventful. Until on our next few karaoke trips we ended up: flirting with the girls at the counter (in what had to be the most hard working flirt EVER due to the language barrier), sending a poor Big echo employee flying into the wall as a result of one of the guys accidentally shoving a door into her face, finding a boy sat outside crying on his keitai denwa and being witnesses to one girl getting a bit of a telling off by her manager after she dropped to her knees in our karaoke room to innocently explain how karaoke works up in the place (or so we thought!)

Karaoke is very English friendly. Whilst I did scan the book for some Hikaru Utada, Gackt and Glay; the Japanese song book features NO English what-so-ever. And of course the Japanese alphabet isn’t like the English one, so I had no luck finding anybody or anything. English songbook it was! Everybody ended up invariably finding their juhachiban. Turns out mine (un-knowing to me prior) was Sir-mix-a-lot’s “Baby got back”.