Japan's Karaoke & Singing Culture

About this book

Walk into any karaoke box in Japan and understand everything on the screen. In Japan, karaoke is not a party trick but a national institution: private soundproofed rooms, two great machine networks, a catalogue of hundreds of thousands of songs, scoring that reads your voice like a chart, and manners — the queue, the applause, the last song — refined over fifty years. English coverage stops at travel sidebars and solo-karaoke news features. This complete guide presents 200 karaoke landmarks, song traditions and singing places in one uniform, comparable format: each entry's story, the craft of its rooms, machines and hosts, its sound, repertoire and character, and how to sing there well and politely. Meet the karaoke box and the solo booth, DAM and Joysound, the snack-bar mama and the community-hall circle, enka and its kobushi turn, Misora Hibari's examination songs, precision scoring and the pitch bar, NHK's Nodo Jiman, the inventor of 1971, and the noraebang, KTV and videoke rooms that carried the empty orchestra around the world. Includes a four-checks method for reading any karaoke night: the room and the machine, the song and the singer, the sound and the score, the manners and the company. No lyrics are quoted — songs are introduced by title, artist, era and custom, as the karaoke catalogues themselves present them — and prices, hours and rules are never fixed, only explained, with official confirmation directed in every entry.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.