Karaoke is a Mirror for Japanese Society

The J-List staff had fun at our New Year’s Party on Friday, eating and drinking on J-List’s tab as a reward for their hard work over the busy Christmas season, followed by a few hours singing “You wa Shock!” (YouTube link) at a nearby karaoke box. I’ve always been a fan of karaoke, having used it to help me learn Japanese, since learning vocabulary by memorizing songs can be an effective memory tool, plus it gives you new connections to the country that are more important than the vocabulary words you happen to pick up. Karaoke is a good topic to explain the concept of 空気 kuuki, which literally means “air” and by extension, the social atmosphere around a given group. When you pack ten people into a small karaoke box, obviously making sure everyone in the group has fun is important. I love to sing a lot, but if I hog the karaoke machine others might not be happy, so handing the karaoke book song input computer device thing to someone who hasn’t had a turn yet is good manners. Japanese have a natural tendency to demure to others in social situations, a concept called 遠慮 enryo (to refrain from doing something out of politeness), and it’s important to break through this by encouraging those who haven’t sung yet to choose a song, of course without pushing too hard in case they really dislike singing in front of others. If you’re with a group of otakus it’s fine to sing anime songs to your heart’s content, but this might turn off people from different groups, so I make sure my repertoire of songs includes general songs as well. People who aren’t good at understanding the often complex social situations around them are called K.Y. in Japanese (for 空気読めない kuuki yomenai, meaning “can’t read the air”), and part of learning a language like Japanese involves becoming sensitive to the subtle social cues around you.

You can learn a lot about Japan from singing karaoke.