Pre-pandemic, some of his favorite karaoke snacks across the city were Joy in the Nakameguro neighborhood, Chaniwa in Sangenjaya, and the now-closed Micky in hip Ebisu. Kai Yakushiji, a 29-year-old sales planner at Spotify Japan, was introduced to karaoke by his grandmother when he was a kid. Hopefully, we can return sooner than later. I talked to Tokyo locals about what karaoke means to them, their favorite memories from behind the mic, and the places that typified what it meant to live and sing in Tokyo, pre-pandemic. In an era of social distancing, there’s still a long way to go before friends openly gather to blow off steam with karaoke.īut karaoke can help us heal, even while we hit pause. But even though people in cities like Tokyo have the option to visit their favorite karaoke box or snack bar again, keeping the lights on seems mostly symbolic. In a world where karaoke bars have gone silent, Japan’s reopened in May. It is embraced by tech-savvy hipsters and buttoned-up businessmen alike, as at home in the twisting alleys of Shinjuku as the subterranean subway izakaya.īut this year is… different. In manga kissas - private rooms where friends pull manga off the stacks while snacking and drinking - karaoke is the neverending soundtrack. It’s a major draw at sunakku (snack bars), where strangers learn one another’s names through the magic of the karaoke machine. It’s alive in the hundreds of thousands of private-room karaoke boxes, where glowing tambourines and mics fuel seemingly endless nights (the nomihōdai, or “all-you-can-drink” option, also helps). In Japan, karaoke is a way of life embedded in the cultural fabric. Then, as now, it was a social balm and an excuse for revelry in good times and bad. When Kobe-based musician Daisuke Inoue debuted the first karaoke machine in Japan back in the ‘70s, it became an enduring national pastime, a collective release during an oppressively bleak financial crisis.