Japan’s karaoke crowd finds its voice again, with added face masks
AS SACRED as the pub is to Britons and the church to Americans, Japan’s karaoke boxes are once again throwing open their doors to anyone – regardless of ability – who has the urge to sing.
While the Japanese government still recommend that karaoke boxes remain closed out of concern that people singing in enclosed spaces are more likely to share the coronavirus, the vast majority of cities and prefectures across the country on Wednesday gave operators the green light for the crooning to resume.
Like many other aspects of daily life in Japan, which has reported 16,804 infections and 886 deaths, things have changed.
Front-desk staff at the Big Echo karaoke venue, in the nightlife district to the west of Yokohama Station, are behind a thick sheet of clear plastic hanging from the ceiling, and food and drinks are delivered to individual booths by employees in face masks and rubber gloves. Microphones are sanitised after every session and then encased in a plastic cover, the maximum number of people in a 12-person “party room” has been halved, while taped markers on the floor in the lobby indicate how far people should stay away from each other.
“It felt a little different at first, but once you start singing you very quickly do not notice it any more,” said Moe Hatakayama, a part-time office worker who lives in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.
“The most important thing, for me, is that I can at last come back and sing with my friends or by myself,” she said. “It’s funny, but I’ve only realised how much I missed being able to do karaoke when it was impossible to do it. I guess we all sort of took it for granted.”
Japan’s karaoke boxes were among the first businesses to shut down when the scale of the coronavirus outbreak in the country became apparent. There was immediate concern within the industry that venues would inevitably become a hotbed of transmissions as they violated the “three Cs” of closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings.
There are more than 100,000 karaoke boxes across Japan, down from a peak of 160,680 in 1996, and operators used the down time to ensure that venues would be able to reopen as soon as the authorities lifted the state of emergency.
The industry association has drawn up a list of recommendations that include ensuring that rooms are well ventilated and that microphones, remote controls and all surfaces are thoroughly cleaned after each group has left while seats are rearranged so people are not facing each other.
“We have introduced every precaution we can at our venues and we have instructed our staff on new procedures,” said Hideo Mayoka, a spokesman for Daiichikosho Co, which operates the Big Echo chain of karaoke boxes, one of the largest in Japan.
“I love coming to karaoke because it’s a form of stress relief,” Hatakayama said.