Adam's Japanese Journey: Karaoke and Akihabara!

Want to know what’s a lot of fun? Karaoke! Or as it’s written in Japanese: カラオケ.

I was pretty addicted to karaoke, which is odd because I’m not a great vocalist by all means. I even made my team suffer through me singing a song in Japanese, and most of them couldn’t follow along with it. But in my defense… I didn’t travel from Wisconsin to Japan to sing only American songs and not attempt even one Japanese song.

If you don’t know how karaoke works in Japan, I’ll briefly explain it: you have a private room with your group of friends, and you can bring in your own drinks and snacks. So there’s no need to embarrass oneself in front of complete strangers.

The first time we did karaoke was during our work orientation when we were given a night off to explore the area around Gotenba. It was a blast, but we had a big group, so it was tough to choose songs that I knew. I know, I know, it’s not all about me, but I couldn’t help that I wanted to sing some Yellowcard and Mighty Mighty Bosstones!

Our team split up for one of the camps, and there were only eight of us the second time that we did karaoke. That’s when I sang “My Friend” by Spyair, and I was only slightly buzzed, which meant that I was completely aware of how bad I sounded. Oh well, YOLO!

Our Japanese director was planning on taking a few of us to the fireworks in the middle of July, but it rained so badly that we decided to sing karaoke one last time. This time, there were only five of us in the group, and I sang one more Spyair song: Imagination. The karaoke machine actually scored me against other people that sang the same song, and I scored around 2,000 out of over 3,000 participants. That means I beat about 1/3 of the Japanese contestants, so I was pretty proud of that.

Yeah… karaoke’s a lot of fun. If you go to Japan, you have to try it, and if you have been to Japan and tried karaoke, what did you think of it? Feel free to leave a comment below!