There are many stereotypes of Japanese people, one is that they love their karaoke. Going by the number of karaoke bars around here, this is true. They are everywhere in cities and large towns, sometimes there are as many as two or three on a single street. It’s almost as bad as the abundance of GAME stores in the UK.

Karaoke bars don’t have the same set up as in Britain, drunken humiliation in front of strangers is not as popular with the Japanese as it seems to be with Brits. So groups of people go into private booths and sing their heart out with their friends, rather than on a stage to a crowd of randoms.

The more often I go to these places, the more I find my level with quite what song I can get away with. I say “get away with” rather than sing because I really can’t. I broke my karaoke cherry singing Poison by Alice Cooper and that is about the only kind of song I can do. If I try to do any song that requires anything other than a low gravely growl it just sounds horrid. Really horrid. Dirty Diana is out of window and woe betide anyone who hears me sing anything by Queen.

Good Old Fashioned Loverboy was such a disaster and you will by surprised quite how bad a choice Debaser was.

Luckily there are a great amount of songs which are now on Shaun’s Karaoke Hit List. Songs such as Fuel, Hungry Like The Wolf and my magnum opus, I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing. Usually my tactics are to go for a few of these bankers and then go for a few untried experiments. At the moment I am interested in trying out I’ve Just Seen A Face and maybe Mr. Brightside.

I also really want to have a go at King Of Bongo by Mano Negra but annoyingly and disgracefully Manu Chao and his back catalogue are just not admired enough here. I wonder how popular karaoke is in Latin America? Only there can I live my dream of singing about little monkeys playing bongos.

With all that news that for the last few years that CD sales have been dropping I reckon that the Japanese have found a way to halt the slide, cool packaging.

I have recently become addicted a Japanese singer recommended to me by one my students. Her name (the singer, not the student) is Ringo Shiina a deeply interesting musician with an incredible voice that has me spellbound. She also seems like quite a unique person, she appears to have an obsession with symmetry, almost all of her albums track listings are symmetrical and she has two scars on her back that give the impression of cut off angel’s wings. Also she once bought a Mercedes that kept on breaking down so she had it sawn in half and named it Hitler, then used it in one of her videos.

So after downloading all her MP3s to “sample” her work I have started to try and track down a few of her CDs. So I have been hunting in my local (and brilliantly named) entertainment shop, BOOK OFF, for her various albums. One of the first CDs I found was the single Ringo No Uta (The Apple’s Song) the CD case had a black dot on the front plastic. I thought this was awesome and bought the CD straight away.

I may need to explain why this is so ace; When she decided to quit her solo career and form a band, Ringo (probably due to her aforementioned obsession with symmetry) had her trademark mole removed. So as the cover to the Ringo No Uta single is basically her face, you can remove the booklet for a picture of her sans mole and then put in back in for an image of Ringo with her mole still intact.

Like so:

Well it’s an original idea at least! The video of the song also showcases the fact her mole was removed.

The next example is Adult, the second album from Ringo’s band, Tokyo Jihen (or Tokyo Incidents, or 東京事変 depending on who you speak to). Which as you can see has a fragrance bottle on the front, well if you investigate the booklet you’ll find a scratch and sniff “sample” of it. That is really quite a nice touch, I thought, and leaves a pleasant smell in the room every time you take out the CD. Little touches like the two I mentioned are really nice in my opinion and though small make all the difference. I also own Ringo’s 2nd solo album but I found nothing special with it unfortunately, except maybe a picture of her giving a monkey a cigarette. But then I frown on that kind of thing.

Ask anyone in the UK what the different flavours of Kit Kat are and the will give you 3 simple answers: Milk chocolate, orange and mint.

Ask anyone in Japan and they will be there for while as they list a never ending stream of answers.

Japan seems to be the world’s testing ground for bizarre Kit Kat flavours, here they are not content with the usual 3 but go for a bit of maple syrup, melon, vanilla bean, grape, apple, caramel, sweet potato, kiwi and even cherry blossom. These apparently only sell for a limited time only and now my lunch breaks are often spent going to my local combini in the search for that new exotic types of Kit Kat to try.

My own personal experience has been with 4 of these flavours. Kiwi flavour was my first flirtation with the exotic and opening the wrapper to find the chocolate was GREEN came as a bit of a shock. I was not that impressed overall as the mix of chocolate and kiwi was far too sweet. Next came cookies and milk which is yumilicious and really should be brought to other markets. I have recently tried hazelnut and while it tasted of Christmas, it was fairly dull.

On Saturday though, I thought I’d hit the jackpot when I found “Midnight Eagle”. My world exploded into a vista of bright lights and pretty colours as I wondered quite what I had found. Midnight Eagle? What could that possibly taste of?

Well, I was soon disappointed when I opened the packet to find simple white chocolate Kit Kats. I later related my tale of frustration and disappointment to one of the school’s receptionists who told me that Midnight Eagle is some film and it is just a marketing campaign. I was so downhearted, mainly at the missed opportunity for eagle flavoured Kit Kats.

After some googling I found out that due to the similarity with the bar’s name and the Japanese phrase kitto katsu, which roughly translates to “You will surely win!”, has reportedly led to parents and children buying them for school examination days as a sort of good luck charm. However, transliteration is not always in Nestlé’s favour – kitto katto (where ‘katto’ is taken to be a katakana transliteration of the English verb ‘cut’) is understood to bestow Kit Kat with the less positive significance of “you will surely miss the cut”. As such, gifts of a single Kit Kat are a running joke for senior high school students taking the University Entrance Examinations in some areas.

Due to the explosion of exciting flavours available here I have recently eaten a lot more chocolate than I have for a looooong time.

Today I discovered that there is no word in Japanese for “savoury”. The nearest thing a dictionary comes out with is “spicy” and that’s just not right at all. This got my thinking about words that the Japanese have but have no real English equivalent. Due to my amazingly poor Japanese I can only think of one:

“Genki”

I really can’t think of any English word that quite sums up the way genki is used. Sure, the direct translation for “How are you?” <Are you well?> is “genki desu ka?” (元気ですか) but genki means so much more than just “well”. I don’t think I could adequately translate the meaning and it’s usage with resorting to gestures and mime.

I don’t know quite what it says about our cultures that these particular words are missing but I did once hear that there is no German word for “fluffy”. Read into that what you will.

I was listening to the latest Pods & Blogs podcast from the BBC and they were discussing the results of googling your own name and the privacy issues related to it. This prompted me to google for my own name because I hadn’t done it for a while. Other the expected results such as this very website, I also found a post on an internet forum, by a man that has never met me, which describes me as “goofy”.

I may need to explain: Many years ago (well, two) Sports Interactive, the developers of the Football Manager series of games invited people to send in their name and a photo which then could be used as a Regen player. Regen players were players that appear in the game with random stats which replace the real players as they retire. I sent in my photo and luckily got chosen to appear in the game, although, whenever I turned up in my game, I was always awful.

Now, however, I’ve discovered this was not true all the time,

I’m playing as chelsea and in 2009 i am beginning to get the benefit of chelsea’s current “sign every 12 year old campaign”. There’s a striker called “Shaun Hickox”, 17 and English labelled the next Geoff Hurst who has a really goofy looking picture and came through my youth team. When i got him in the batch of players my assistant says he looked like “one of the best of his generation” which i’ve never seen before. His stats are reasonably average but he seems to score every time he plays – including announcing himself on the first team at 17 with an fa cup hat trick in my b team vs qpr… He’s an absolute gem!
Rob McK

It’s nice that I have fulfilled my footballing potential in one reality at least (even if it’s a virtual one) and being called “goofy” is better than “ugly”, I guess.

I’m an absolute gem :)