Karaoke in Japan

Perhaps the greatest invention of all time and the best form of entertainment in Japan...Karaoke! You are perhaps wondering why this has never appeared in the blog before. It was a shocking absence. But after a late night Wednesday karaoke marathon the situation had to be remedied.

Karaoke in Japan is all that you dreamed and more. With a number of friends you can pay for a private room for 1, 2, 3 or all night karaoke sessions. Usually this includes free drinks until the bar closes around 3 am. The drinks are usually syrupy concoctions but you can request straight liqueur and visit the equally free soda machine to create your own cocktails. Prices are incredibly reasonable. Some people will even pay for an all night karaoke booth over a hotel room in a big city if they are planning a late night anyway.

Every karaoke bar has a book that includes English songs. There may not be the greatest selection but you can always find the classics as well as a surprising amount of new songs. Everyone has a personal favorite and unlike traditional karaoke bars in the west, Gloria Gaynor, Grease melodies and Shania Twain will only make rare appearances. Instead you can butcher your favorite songs with plenty of time to choose them and no one to impress but your equally embarrassing friends.

The booths can fit up to 10 or 15 in most places. Usually I end up with around 5 to 7 people. Food can be ordered, although the pictures are bigger than the servings and the cheesy bread is really bread and a shot glass of congealed mysterious cheese-substitute. One of the greatest experiences to try is room crashing - which involves sneaking past the staff and into another karaoke room to see if they'd like you to join them for a rollicking number. Language barriers can be a problem as it is much more difficult than you can imagine to sing in another language. But the experience can be a lot of fun with drunken Japanese singers excited to practice their English with the foreign visitor. Be warned however, the karaoke staff will not look fondly on this interruption and will scold you back to your room. I always feign innocence - Where's my room?

Big Echo and Joy Joy are the two most famous karaoke bars (at least in my area of Nagoya). Big Echo is much fancier with massaging chairs and more interesting videos, but it is Joy Joy with its cheap beverages and ridiculous homemade videos that has captured my heart. (As you sing Creep by Radiohead, a young man will appear on screen sadly strumming his guitar while his girlfriend searches him out in an ominous city...several songs later while crooning to Barbie Girl this same young man will appear to be chased down by his poor girlfriend again. At least this is how it seems to me).

When you visit Japan, Karaoke should be in the top ten list of things to do. No matter how terrible your singing voice you will have an amazing time. Believe me, I speak from experience.

Matsuzaka Fever!

Dice K has been news in Japan since the Red Sox signed him. This has been great for me, as now, I can turn on the TV and see my old friends the Red Sox almost every day.

When I first arrived, the Yankees and the Mariners dominated American baseball news. Ichiro can be seen on TV even on variety shows which is a lot of fun. Aside from a stint on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, American baseball players are really only seen talking after baseball games. It can be quite funny to see Ichiro eating strange food or gambling on TV for his Japanese fans. He is incredibly popular and one of my young students dreams of going to Seattle just to see him play!

My hope is that Dice K fever will make Boston the place to go in America for Japanese tourists. I love talking about personal experiences with students and I feel like baseball has brought us closer. I will proudly rock my Red Sox cap when the weather agrees (even though most Japanese women only sport baseball caps at the stadiums) and I think it will be appreciated. Even better, I will be able to watch sports updates on the news here in Japan. Tonight I watched good old Curt Shilling practice his Japanese for the media. It was funny to see it and understand his mispronunciations, but totally cute as well. Hopefully someday I'll meet Daisuke Matsuzaka and be able to introduce myself properly as a fan. In the meantime my father and I are on the lookout to find the next Japanese baseball star to come to America. When my dad visits in April we'll be watching a game for sure.

Over Stimulation of the Senses

Japan is a country that enjoys stimulating the senses. For the visual sense there is bright flashing lights, day-glow advertisements, neon restaurant signs that never stop glowing, and storefront windows that display their goods in every color of the rainbow. For the gustatory sense there is an abundant amount of fruit, fish, vegetables, soups, and sweets boasting their own distinctive flavor. For the tactile sense there is an array of everything from soft camel hair sweaters to squishy stuffed animals. For the olfactory sense fish is the most common scent, followed quickly by bean paste, and strawberries, which happen to be Japan's fruit of the month. Each month Japan focuses on a different fruit!! And oh for the auditory sense. If loud noises bother you, or you love peace and quiet, Japan is NOT the country for you. When trucks back up, or turn in Japan, they actually play a song and then talk, saying in Japanese what movement they are doing. Cars advertising radio stations speed down the street with megaphones attached to their roofs, blaring songs and talking. A potato vendor sells potatoes once a week outside of my apartment. He drives around in a car yelling "potato, potato, please buy my potatoes". With the help of his megaphone, his song never fails to wake me up. Store clerks, hired for this sole purpose, stand in front of their stores screaming "irashaimase" which means "welcome". Pachinko Parlors (casinos), blare loud music, and the sound of the slot machines going off as someone wins 1000 yen. However, the place that produces some of the strangest sounds is the train station. Many train stations play the same exact melody continuously. Then as a train is pulling up to the station, a new melody will play over the existing one. Each train station has a different melody for the arrival of the train, some play "Mary had a little lamb", while others play "old MacDonald had a farm". On top of these songs, most trains stations play piercing bird calls from their speakers every few hours. My roommate and I were in a train station in the middle of the countryside once when the train station's song system became jumbled. Instead of the usual two songs and bird calls, there must have been a malfunction because all of a sudden about four songs were playing at the same time at a much higher speed than usual. If I was a newcomer to Japan I would have sworn I was going crazy!! To get away from all this noise you have to hightail it to the country side, where the quietness is so deep you can feel it!! I love Japan, but when I come back to my quiet town in America, I certainly won't miss the over stimulation of the senses!!

Valentine's Day for Men

Like so many other western holidays, Valentine's Day has been a big event in Japan. It retains the the special hearts, the red and pink, the chocolate and the flower associations, but has changed in other dramatic ways. In Japan, it is more of a holiday for men. Women give presents, sometimes many or simply one elaborate present to the men in their lives.

Coworkers, children and significant others can all expect presents on this day. At my office, our female staffers offered chocolates to the teachers. (They did not specify whether this was for only men or not so I gladly took part in eating the presents). In some buildings women offer giri-choko or Obligation Chocolate to office workers which can be very delicous and expensive chocolates. Luckily, this year I bought only one box of chocolate from my local train station. It was beautifully wrapped, as all Japanese presents are, and was delivered to my staff who happened to be leaving my branch that day. It was not expensive, but certianly delicious I hope.

However, there is an upside to Valentine's being a holiday for men. A clever company decided to invent a holiday for couples that focuses all attention on women: White Day. Lucky men who were given chocolate can now return the favor by presenting their loved ones with marshmellows. Yes, that's right: marshmellows.

The holiday was marketed by a marshmellow company back in the 1960's. Since then other companies have been as taken with the holiday as women are and have branched out in their offerings. It is not just as popular to give white chocolate, and increasingly lingerie. Today, while shopping I saw hand towels (incredibly useful in public bathrooms where hand-driers or paper-towels are absent) molded into flower shapes and delicately wrapped on sale under a large banner reading White Day. It appears I should have given out more chocolate, because I really could use a hand towel...

Small Apartments

Apartments in Japan are notoriously small, but generally I'm pretty satisfied with mine. Most homes do not come with stoves, dishwashers, or driers. At first I missed the wonderous fluffy towels and the easily worn (no need to iron) clothes I pulled from the drier, but nowadays what I miss most is the dishwasher. A few days of skipping on the dishes with 3 roommates leads to quite a mess. Clothes, on the other hand, can be hung inside and ironed in minutes. The extra work is barely noticeable. Stoves, I've never used, and in fact, it is my lack of a microwave that causes the greatest hardship. I am now forced to cook everything on the stovetop or in the rice cooker. I have adapted, but my microwaving habits instilled form youth will return as soon as they can.

The one disappointment is the rather large paper screened wall which represents a bedroom. This room is rather ridiculously situated next to the kitchen. Thus dish washing, tea making and general rummaging for food is a difficult procedure late at night or early in the morning.

It is the loudness that must occur in homes with thin walls that force most gatherings to occur at izakayas or restaurants. Too much noise and your neighbors will be miserable. Likewise in homes where in-laws typically reside with their married children and grandchildren, the search for privacy can lead couples to the infamous Love Hotels where room charges can go by the hour or the evening and everything from big screen TVs to private swimming pools can be found.

Japanese Restaurants

One of my favorite things about living in Japan is the incredible number of restaurants in the city. Two days ago I accidentally took the long way home and discovered about 50 new restaurants within a 15 minute walk of my home. Amazing. It makes me a little sad to know I will never come close to eating in them all.

There are fancy restaurants where you can sit at tables like bar stools and watch skilled cooks barbecue delicious food. It is quite common to order food in rounds in Japan too. Start with one small meal to split then add another and another and another. Thus the advantage of sitting near the cooks is undeniable. This can, however, be a big problem with group dining if you are not hungry. You could end up with a $40 bill you hadn't planned on. At group dinners it is best to plan to eat massive quantities of food, opt out altogether or state your intentions at the beginning.

The best meals out are special occasions. For our office Christmas party, the English teachers and the Japanese staff went to SanMaru (or some similar named restaurant - that means everything is 300 Yen) We ordered anything that looked good and it was only three hundred yen a piece. We shared things, so you can try a variety of things - this is especially fun when the Japanese order their favorite foods = chicken cartilage, raw tuna salad, etc. You can try a bite of things you might not order for yourself.

Dried Fish

In Japan, fish is everywhere. From supermarkets selling fish that has already been killed too live fish flopping around in buckets at local fish markets. You can't walk down any street without seeing or smelling some type of real fish or fish flavored or shaped products. However, you would expect mixed nuts purchased at a westernized, large grocery store chain not to have dried fish mixed in with the almonds and sunflower seeds, in Japan this is not the case.
For breakfast sometimes I like to have yogurt with granola or muesli. Last week I decided to mix things up and try mixed nuts in my yogurt instead. I picked up the first package I saw that included almonds, not bothering to inspect the picture on the front too closely, or look at the ingredients.
The next morning after sleepily adding the nuts to my yogurt I took bite and noticed that the mixed nuts tasted a bit "fishy" ( no pun intended). Ignoring this, I ploughed ahead and finished my yogurt and mixed nuts, albeit a little disappointingly. Later that day I packed the nuts as a snack for the hiking excursion I was to be going on, I did not plan on eating them, but giving them to my friend Kim to try as she enjoys trying food that other people think tastes gross. I poured some into Kim's hand and as she inspected the clump of nuts she became horrified.
"Sarah, why is this fish staring at me"? She asked. Indeed the fish was staring at her, as were about five more in the pile in her hand. Inside the mixture of nuts there were dried fish coated in batter about 3/4Th's of an inch long and the width of about 2 or 3 sewing needles glued together. Upon close inspection you could see their entire bodies, right down to their curled tails, eyes, and open mouths. No wonder my yogurt tasted "fishy".
The moral of the story? When in Japan don't be surprised if there is fish in anything edible, even mixed nuts.