Friday Night Fun - Japanese Style

A couple of weeks ago I was over at London's teacher's house for a ladies night and she mentioned that one of her favorite things to do on island was karaoke.  What?  This is the land of beautiful beaches and fantastic restaurants and other tropically things to do and she prefers singing to a bar full of drunks?  No, no, she assured me, Japanese karaoke is nothing like American karaoke and I must try it.  Hey, I'm willing to try anything - once - so I organized a neighborhood outing to the closest karaoke place... The Big Echo.

And so I learned last night that the Japanese know how to have fun!  No, seriously, forget all your bad memories about drunkin frat boys trying to sing the Backstreet Boys in front of a bar full of other drunkin frat boys or Uncle Fred at that wedding who hurt your ears with his rendition of You Light Up My Life.  The Japanese have this thing figured out.

First of all, you don't go to a bar and stand up at the front and sing, no, you have your own private (soundproof) room with tables and bench seating.  So we arrived at our reserved time (9:00) and were shown to our room, given a quick charade-demo of how to program the machine and given the catalog (think Sears catalog size) of songs (neatly broken down into Japanese and English songs) and microphones and left to our own devices.  It didn't take long for the one sober part of our party (thanks Krimp!) to figure out how to set up the songs, and it didn't take long for the men-folk to figure out how to order drinks (phone included in the room so you don't have to miss an ounce of fun). 

And boy did we have fun!  In Japanese karaoke everyone sings along to the tune so no embarrasing out of tune moments.  We sang everything from Taylor Swift to Johhny Cash to the B-52s.  Of course it helped that we "pre-partied" at our house first (another tip from London's teacher) and the pitchers of beer were flowing freely.  In fact we were having so much fun that we extended our time so three hours later we stumbled back to the Blue Beater (our van) and headed home.  We'll definitely be going back soon - in fact Stevie has already said that he wants his birthday party there.  All are invited!