Karaoke

Yesterday night was my first experience of that great Japanese tradition, karaoke.

For the record, karaoke is not pronounced as "carry-oakey" in Japanese. It's exactly as it looks: ka-ra-o-keh.

Anyway, this is the only karaoke bar in our little town. It has about 20 rooms, all different sizes, to accommodate different sized groups - ours was a fairly large group, maybe 15, so they put us in one of the biggest rooms. Every room has a table surrounded by squashy benches and a massive television at the front with a space in front of it. Most people don't like to make fools of themselves when they're sober, so they have two options: either you pay 1000 yen (about £7/$10), get one free soft drink and buy your own alcohol to take in, or you pay more for all-you-can-drink alcohol from the bar. The karaoke place happens to be right next door to a huge supermarket, so we chose the first option.

Even though I was one of only two people not drinking, it was actually fun. We got given three microphones, but generally the songs people picked were ones everyone knows so we all ended up singing everything. The song choice is absolutely huge - as well as every Japanese pop song ever written, there was also a massive selection of English and American bands. We did Queen, The Killers, System of a Down, Spice Girls...

Karaoke isn't cheap, but worth it every once in a while. At least if you don't drink, you remember everything.