KARAOKE!

Perhaps you were worried that I had been in Japan for almost a week and had not yet had a Karaoke party!
Last night was the KAIR welcome party. It began in the large hall of the Kaizen Center building (Kaizen center is the cultural agency that runs KAIR). Each artist had to make a speech and be introduced to everyone, and then we had food and lots of Asahi. There was a dance performance by some local students who had gone to the performing arts college- very funny. Then they played some sort of Russian dance song and everyone got up and danced in a circle, randomly kicking our feet and spinning around. The MC of the event is named Nikorai (Nicolai?)- he is a KAIR board member- someone said something about how he always plays this Russian dance song at every event (??) and also always wears his lucky pink shirt- also very funny.

The party then moved to the local “Korean BBQ restaurant” which has a Karaoke room. Nicorai did several stirring renditions of the Beatles and another American, who lives a town over, was there and sang some guns and roses for us. Many other songs were in Japanese and involved jumping up and down and shouting “YEAH YEAH PEACE PEACE.” One of the older men was almost forced into singing “My Way” but backed out so Emma, who is the local JET teacher from Britain, picked it up for him. Despite my dislike of having to hear my own horrible singing voice, I realized I had to participate, so I thought it would be funny to sing “Born in the USA”. This was especially appropriate since they had discovered it was just my birthday and brought me a cake and candles and sung for me. However, I did not know any of the words to born the the USA except the chorus of course- I hadn’t realized Bruce was singing about Vietnam and it has lines such as “going to fight the yellow man”!!! Mostly I focused on belting out “Born in the USA” very loudly.

If anyone has a good suggestion for future karaoke songs that require no singing skills, let me know.