Table Of ContentKARAOKE AROUND THE WORLD
The karaoke machine is much more than an instrument which allows us to be a
star for three minutes. This electronic apparatus, designed for amateur ‘hidden
singers’, originated in Japan in the early 1970s and has since spread to many
countries in the Pacific Rim, East Asia, North America and Europe. It is a
medium which simultaneously evokes musical technologies, personal
experiences and collective memories which go far beyond microphones and pre-
recorded accompaniments. Karaoke Around the World situates karaoke as
technology, place and musical behaviour, investigating karaoke in its social and
cultural context, and examining the ‘journeys’ of the karaoke apparatus and its
global and local effects.
What underlies those karaoke experiences which involve people as singers, co-
singers and listeners? Using the theoretical framework of thinkers from Erving
Goffman to Foucault, the contributors consider the technological, spatial,
communicative, ethnic, national, political, musical and gender aspects of karaoke
in specific places and times across the globe. This study explores the influence of
karaoke in such different societies as the United Kingdom, North America, Italy,
Sweden, Brazil, Korea and Japan. The essays not only answer a variety of
questions about this phenomenon, but also open up possible ways of theorizing
contemporary music practice in the future.
The Editors: Toru Mitsui is Professor of Musicology and English at Kanazawa
University, Japan. Shuhei Hosokawa is Associate Professor of Humanities at
Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Contributors: Johan Fornäs, Shuhei Hosokawa, William H.Kelly, Casey Man
Kong Lum, Toru Mitsui, Hiroshi Ogawa, Shinobu Oku, Akiko Otake, Paolo
Prato.
ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN CULTURAL AND
MEDIA STUDIES
Series Advisors: David Morley and James Curran
1. VIDEO, WAR AND DIASPORIC IMAGINATION
Dona Kolar-Panov
2. REPORTING THE ISRAELI-ARAB CONFLICT
How hegemony works
Tamar Liebes
3. KARAOKE AROUND THE WORLD
Global technology, local singing
Edited by Toru Mitsui and Shuhei Hosokawa
KARAOKE AROUND THE
WORLD
Global technology, local singing
Edited by Toru Mitsui
and Shuhei Hosokawa
London and New York
First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1998 selection and editorial matter: Toru Mitsui and Shuhei Hosokawa;
individual chapters, the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Karaoke around the world: global technology, local singing/edited
by Toru Mitsui and Shuhei Hosokawa.
p. cm.—(Routledge research in cultural and media studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: The genesis of karaoke/Toru Mitsui
—The effects of karaoke on music in Japan/Hiroshi Ogawa—Karaoke and
middle-aged and older women/Shinobu Oku—The adaptability of karaoke
in the United Kingdom/William H.Kelly—From TV to holidays: karaoke in
Italy/Paolo Prato—Filling voids along the byway: identification and
interpretation in the Swedish forms of karaoke/Johan Fornäs—Singing
in a cultural enclave: karaoke in a Japanese-Brazilian community/Shuhei
Hosokawa—The karaoke dilemma: on the interaction between collectivism
and individualism/Casey Man Kong Lum—Karaoke in East Asia/
Akiko Otake and Shuhei Hosokawa.
1. Karaoke—History and criticism. I. Mitsui, Toru, 1948– .
II. Hosokawa, Shuhei, 1955– . III. Series.
ML3795.K22 1998
306.4’84–dc21 97–19902
CIP
MN
ISBN 0-203-98239-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-16371-4 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS
List of figures vii
List of tables viii
List of contributors ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
TORU MITSUI AND SHUHEI HOSOKAWA
PART I
1 The genesis of karaoke: How the combination of 29
technology and music evolved
TORU MITSUI
2 The effects of karaoke on music in Japan 43
HIROSHI OGAWA
3 Karaoke and middle-aged and older women 53
SHINOBU OKU
PART II
4 The adaptability of karaoke in the United Kingdom 81
WILLIAM H.KELLY
5 From TV to holidays: Karaoke in Italy 99
PAOLO PRATO
6 Filling voids along the byway: Identification and 115
interpretation in the Swedish forms of karaoke
JOHAN FORNÄS
PART III
7 Singing in a cultural enclave: Karaoke in a Japanese- 135
Brazilian community
SHUHEI HOSOKAWA
vi
8 The karaoke dilemma: On the interaction between 161
collectivism and individualism in the karaoke space
CASEY MAN KONG LUM
9 Karaoke in East Asia: Modernization, Japanization, or 173
Asianization?
AKIKO OTAKE AND SHUHEI HOSOKAWA
Index 197
FIGURES
2.1 Million-sellers of singles, 1980–95 47
2.2 Numbers of karaoke singers in Tokyo and Kobe by gender, 1992–3 48
3.1 Customers of karaoke pubs and snack bars, 1995 55
3.2 Customers of karaoke boxes, 1995 55
3.3 Customers of hotels, inns and other places, 1995 56
3.4 Replies to the questions: ‘Did you like singing alone in front of 59
people?’ and ‘Do you like singing alone in front of people?’
3.5 Percentage of students at universities and taking short courses at 60
universities, 1970–90
3.6 When do you sing? 61
3.7 How often did you sing karaoke last year? 61
3.8 How often do you practise karaoke singing? 62
3.9 How do you practise karaoke singing? 62
3.10 Why does karaoke appeal to you? 63
3.11 ‘On’na no Shigure’ 70
3.12 Construction of three rhythmic components of ‘Oiwake style’ by 71
F.Koizumi
3.13 ‘On’na no Ryoka’ 72
3.14 ‘Chindo Monogatari’ 73
3.15 Prominence of lyrics 73
3.16 ‘Kore ga Watashi no Ikiru Michi’ 74
TABLES
2.1 Karaoke singing, by age and gender 46
3.1 Marks in ‘music’ attained by amateur choir members in their 59
schooldays (evaluated on a relative scale)
3.2 Amount of schooling received by choir members 60
3.3 Songs requested in order of frequency in the karaoke markets 64
3.4 ‘On’na no Ryoka’ [Woman’s fishing song] 65
3.5 ‘On’na no Shigure’ [I, a woman, am in a hot spa town on a cold, 66
drizzling evening]
3.6 Enka aspects and characteristics, and three examples of contemporary 69
enka
3.7 Evaluation of ‘On’na no Ryoka’ 75
3.8 Notes on how to sing the chorus of ‘On’na no Ryoka’ 76
4.1 Song sequence from an Oxford pub 85
7.1 Numbers of participants in the ABRAC karaoke contests, 1986–94 142
CONTRIBUTORS
Johan Fornäs is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at
Stockholm University, Sweden. His main focus of research is on cultural
studies, popular music and youth culture. His books include Cultural Theory
and Late Modernity, Youth Culture in Late Modernity and In Garageland:
Rock, Youth and Modernity.
Shuhei Hosokawa is Associate Professor of Humanities at Tokyo Institute of
Technology. His main interest is in the historiography of Japan’s popular
music and the culture of the Japanese-Brazilian community. His articles were
published in such international journals as Cultural Studies, Semiotica and
Popular Music, and his publications in Japanese include Rhetoric of Walkman
(1981) and Aesthetics of Recorded Sound (1990).
William H.Kelly is a PhD student at the Institute of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, University of Oxford, where he is completing a thesis on the
karaoke phenomenon in Japan. He has published several articles on karaoke
singing in the context of both Japan and the United Kingdom.
Casey Man Kong Lum teaches Telecommunications Studies at the William
Paterson College of New Jersey and is author of In Search of a Voice:
Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese America. His teaching
and research interests include media ecology, culture and communication,
inter-cultural communication, the ethnography of audience reception of media
and Asian Pacific American media and culture. His work has also appeared in
a number of journals and books.
Toru Mitsui is Professor of Musicology and English at Kanazawa University,
Japan, mainly in charge of popular music studies at the graduate school. He has
served as the Chair of IASPM (the International Association for the Study of
Popular Music) since 1993. His numerous writings range from Bluegrass
Music (1967) to ‘You are My Sunshine’: The Music and Politics of the
American South (1989) and The Story of Jeans (1990).
Hiroshi Ogawa is Professor of Mass Communication at Kansai University,
Osaka. He has long been interested in the sociology of culture, especially
music, and he is the author of Society Doing Music (1988) and Music and
Society in the Media Age (1993).
