The Serious Business of Song: Karaoke as Discipline and Industry in Japan

Karaoke, or the act of singing along to a pre-recorded vocal-less audio track (often accompanied by visuals), has drawn a considerable amount of attention as one of Japan’s foremost pop-cultural exports. Book-length studies such as Hosokawa & Mitsui’s Karaoke Around The World (1998), Drew’s Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody (2001), Zhou & Tarocco’s Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon (2013) and Brown’s Karaoke Idols: Popular Music and the Performance of Identity (2015) have viewed the narrative of karaoke’s journey from Japanese invention to global success story as one fundamentally mediated by ‘local’ uptake; karaoke as a medium that adapts technologically and performatively depending on where it is being consumed. However, this view of karaoke ‘by-satellite’, as a series of interconnected but disparate local scenes, obscures a key dimension; karaoke as systematically informed by Japan’s socio-cultural forms and spaces, as opposed to being merely a ‘product’ of Japan. Can the Japanese karaoke experience instead be re-situated as part of something larger―both a vital component in a thriving domestic music sector, but also as a key node linking together the ideas of ‘practice’ and ‘pastime’? Is it possible to read karaoke in Japan as not merely a playful form of musical interaction, but one in which wider, pre-existing structures and systems of social capital formation are re-enacted and given firmer meaning?