Karaoke
Date 2007/4/24 10:43:03 | Topic: Japanese Culture
| A typical industry in which Japan is a world leader is electronics. Japan is also at the world’s highest level in semiconductor memories and computer hardware. Music is one area where the country has finally caught up with the world standard, after having been far behind as recently as 30 years ago.
 Among the products of the post-war educational system, the harvest of musicians is notable. It is not unusual these days for Japanese young people to win first or second place in famous music contests. Japan has also become one of the top countries in the world in production of Western musical instruments. Japan is especially strong with such instruments as the electone, which uses advanced electronics technology. KARAOKE is a perfect combination of Japan’s high electronics technology and its depth of appreciation of music.
Japan achieved tremendous economic growth for more than forty years. Labor demand funneled the rural populations to big cities and to the Pacific Ocean belt. Traditional community values suffered among the uprooted and alienated people of the new population centers.
At the same time, the birth rate declined drastically so that now there are fewer and fewer children. The old style of community, in which young people lived intermixed with old people, played with their friends and enjoyed festivals, is disappearing. Many people live lonely lives without communities to belong to. This has created a need to form new human relationships. One of the reasons why many salary men go out drinking with their colleagues, play golf together or take lessons is to form new relationships. Teenagers do not have many brothers and sisters.
They don’t have many friends, and are busy studying.
Karaoke is an effective device to deepen human relations, like village festivals in the old days. It’s a bit like children playing baseball or sumo has expanded beyond mere drinking sessions at bars. These days, a new trend is Karaoke boxes.
The Karaoke rooms now bring in as much as 553 billion yen. There are many fans, from teenagers to the aged. Japan is such a mature society in many ways that most people are patient enough to listen even to those whose singing is atrocious.
Through the singing sessions at Karaoke places, they improve and begin to feel as if they are professional singers.
As Japanese corporations become internationalized, there was a drastic increase in the numbers of Japanese businessmen stationed abroad. Many of them are stationed there without their families. As if to ease their loneliness, more and more karaoke bars appeared in cities all over the world. Local people are often taken to karaoke bars by for locals are being established.
There are karaoke bars now not only in major Southeast Asian cities but also in the United States and even in major cities in South America. Traditional community life has been declining in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, just as happened in Japan. Karaoke boxes are popular in those countries. There are Chinese language karaoke bars in Beijing and Guangzhou.
In all of Japanese culture, what is spreading the most and liked the most is karaoke.
Translated by Takayama Hideko
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