Trip to Sapporo: Day 9 - Karaoke

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So, even though I have been to Japan twice before, I missed out on the Karaoke experience. It has its obvious explanation that I really -really- suck at remembering lyrics. It goes as far as, with my favorite songs which I may have heard hundred of times, me being able to actually remember the tones of the swedish/english lyrics like a person who don't speak a language can mimic the singer, but I still don't can't seem to get the texts "Into focus". I have the same problem with names of people.

So anyway, this other night I got invited suddenly at midnight from some friends here who was at at karaoke bar in Susukino, so I thought "carpe diem" and off I went. I was lucky to actually catch one of the last subway trains for the night.
This would be obvious for those of you have done this several times, but what you do is that you rent a room (quite small, maybe 3-4 square meters I would say) where you squeeze together on a sofa. Then you order drinks and snacks as you go along, and use small iPad-looking screens to selects songs that then get put in a queue. If you look, you can find latin letters to help you search for songs you know.

Most of the songs we sang that evening was unknown for me, which was no surprise, but AKB48 I recognized and I have heard of EXILE (very popular), and there was a reasonable number of western songs that my fellows chose. I chose ABBA's "Dancing Queen" and Europe's "It's The Final Countdown", both of which I managed to destroy properly as expected. Sake helps a little, at least, the free the artistically side.

So how do you manage as a non-native speaker to get along with all the Japanese songs? Well, fear not, it is not so hard as you may think. You ably need to learn the two basic hiragana/katakana letter families (not the Chinese looking kanji) and to be able to fake well that you know the songs. This meant I managed to have great fun actually, and if you just let go, it doesn't matter that much that you don't know what you are singing. The passion of your co-singers in the refrain makes it all worthwhile, I think.
Afterwards, six o'clock in the morning when the trains starts again, we went for a simple ramen breakfast and then headed home. Reaaally tired but happy to have experienced something thoroughly Japanese.

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