This one’s not about totes, but you’ve got good taste and I thought you might like this photo anyway. 📸📸📸
On the balance of a particular concentration of wine and/or tequila minus time and divided by food, we creep closer to storytime. Friends, family, and strangers that I liked that I’d meet at parties I didn’t like would (inevitably?) hear my tale of writerly shame: the horror of watching two editors at a brand name blog simultaneously live edit a 250-word post, the words flying off the page, off the screen, and into… “past revisions.” It’s shrettuce now. It’s fine. Did you know Google Docs has a chat function?
But it’s good enough for jazz now. So, as a believer in the finer points of truth and justice, I’d typically cut myself off and cut to the chase: This is why I don’t want to blog for anyone anymore.
I guess, to someone, bylines are chic; but I’m old now. Money and healthcare and being able to afford things are better still. Growing up American can really feel like you’ve played yourself at times. The reminders aren’t hard to miss depending on what sort of timeline you’re running nowadays.
I probably gave some versions of this spiel to someone at least once. My b. You are appreciated.
And despite having a personal truth to stump for, last month I got bit by the byline bug again and blogged about “the story of karaoke.” Most of the storytelling, thankfully, was done by my friends in Japan who shared their favorite karaoke memories of the recent past.
Everything that didn’t make it into the final piece is included below.
Watch your word count.
Black Lives Matter.
ooga booga,
fc
The story of karaoke is comparatively undersung considering how odd it is to imagine a world without it let alone who invented what’s become not only the pastime of Japan but the world over. Describing karaoke as a national treasure isn’t too hyperbolic, then, figuring that at the time of its arrival onto the national scene some 50-odd years ago, it provided a collective means of entertainment, expression, and escape for a country caught in an economic recession and looking for a cultural buoy to grasp.
Its role and effect are, to understate it, similar today and which has made its prolonged absence from our lives and routines so heartbreaking. Still, the Japanese should count themselves lucky: Following the end of their state of emergency in May, karaoke’s back—with restrictions to safeguard the health of the singers and the proprietors of the singing machines, of course.
Just as America is America because its landscape is so absolutely pockmarked with countless baseball diamonds and basketball courts, Japan is Japan because of its sheer surfeit of karaoke boxes. These hundreds of thousands of rooms to sing in are a defining feature of the built environment and social contract. Really.
Beyond the boxes, karaoke is often a major draw or signature entertainment offering at a sunakku or “snack bar,” a ubiquitous and stylistically unique sort of drinking establishment once described as a “toned-down, budget version of hostess clubs,” but that are really a kind of informal, however stylized, bar where everyone can learn your name if you put it into the karaoke machine. Add to that, the numerous manga kissas, which attract groups of students and adults alike who just want to buy back some of their time and energy by renting a private room where they and their friends can pull manga and magazines off the stacks, buy some food and drinks, and sing some karaoke, too.
Whatever the setting, karaoke is very accessible and the scenario—song machine, a couple of microphones, liquid courage, salty foods—very consistent. But how did Japan become synonymous with karaoke? What is the story of karaoke in Japan?
Consider: We’ve been singing the songs of ourselves for millennia, forging drinking traditions through the years, and bugging the proverbial piano man for a tune to hum. All these songs we’ve sung and predominantly without the assistance of a karaoke machine. But eventually (and thankfully), it was at a bastion for drinks and music, specifically a Kobe-area snack bar in the late 1960s, that drummer-turned-keyboardist Daisuke Inoue began the story of karaoke.
His hit machine was a contraption consisting of an “amplifier, a microphone, a coin box, and eight-track car stereo,” he recounted in The Appendix in 2013. He called it the Juke 8 and the way he introduced karaoke to the world was through a local businessman who knew he was traveling for work and knew he’d get drunk and knew he’d end up singing but also knew that Inoue and his improvised keyboard jangles wouldn’t be with him. Except, with the Juke 8, they were after a fashion and it was reported back that, indeed, the machine was a hit. Soon after, Inoue added more tracks, 300 originals that he recorded, produced, and mixed himself, and brought his song box to the mass market.
Daisuke Inoue sang his first karaoke song in 1969. By 1971, the Juke 8 was quickly finding its way into bars and music venues across the country, supplanting American-imported jukeboxes as they went. It’s unclear, however, when exactly the act of karaoke as we know it today became so. The name itself predates Inoue’s invention and is a portmanteau of kara okesutura or “empty orchestra,” a reference to the somewhat apocryphal tale from the 1950s of when an electronics company was summoned to pipe in pre-recorded music on a day the local orchestra didn’t show up to perform.
The karaoke machine and the bars and the spaces where you’d sing karaoke were catching on throughout Japan in the 1970s, which, again, was in the middle of a recession. The national mood was that a pick-me-up, a way to relieve stress that everyone could get attuned to, was badly needed. “As karaoke caught on in Kobe, Osaka, Tokyo, and finally throughout Japan,” Inoue said, speaking about the success of his machines, “it seemed that people started to enjoy life a little more and were able to forget some of the stress.”
It was true then and it’s true now: Karaoke helps kick back the cortisol levels. Today, along with being among its most well-regarded cultural products, karaoke is an institutionalized part of regular life in Japan. However, this has been a truly irregular year and not only because we’ve been largely unable to go to our favorite karaoke spot. The “Three C’s”—confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact—are the prevailing convention on social distancing behavior in Japan which has, to its credit, kept cases down while keeping the workaday somewhat recognizably normal. It’s still not the same, though.
Speaking to friends and colleagues in the Tokyo area, while they know they can patronize their favorite karaoke box or snack (if it’s open) again, there’s a shared sense that we’re still chasing the feeling of life before COVID-19. That whether it’s karaoke or a restaurant or in-store shopping, something’s in the air (not to belabor this, but I think we know what it is), rendering these usually atypical experiences untypical in practice.
Overall, what they had to say was that you sing karaoke and it’s not just because you're young and social (even if you think you're shy or anti-social); working or looking for work; in love or looking for love; live in Tokyo or are visiting from a suburb or another city. You do it enough over the years. You go to enough bars, manga kissas, or snacks, and you've sung a lot of karaoke in your lifetime. This is true for the plurality of Tokyoites it seems even if you might not remember the names of the places you sang. It’s a meld of circumstance, culture, and convention, then, that the names of places recede and give prominence to the feeling of the memory in particular.
Also, we get drunk and forget some details.
So, while we did talk about our current reality and situations, we mostly discussed our favorite karaoke memories and the places—for better or for worse—that typified what it meant to live and sing karaoke in Tokyo in the pre-pandemic aughts.