Karaoke Meet-up Tokyo

Sometimes meet-ups groups wake up from their year-long slumber, such as the Karaoke Group. The meet-up venue was Karaoke no Tetsujin in Shinjuku, a karaoke chain that offers various rooms, including big ones for company parties. Costume rental is also possible, though their selection doesn’t seem to be very large.

They even have an English website and organize international karaoke parties. One feature is missing from their international site though: The ability to search for songs and artists and write down the code. The search feature works the same way as the controller in the karaoke rooms and is a nice way to find out if they even have your favorite songs.

Obviously they have a large selection of songs in Japanese, English and Korean language. Other languages are harder to find.

Trying to find something in Spanish, French and German can be tricky, as there is no way to search for a specific language. If a foreign-language song has been a world-wide hit, it’s more likely that you’ll find it in Japan too. Nena’s “99 Luftballons” or Falco’s “Rock me Amadeus” are two examples. A more recent addition to the list of German-language songs are tracks by Rammstein.

It’s possible to search with alphanumeric characters, although the results will be written in the Japanese syllable writing system Katakana. A search for Falco returns “ファルコ”, one for Deep Purple “ディープ・パープル”. The song titles are transcribed as well. What’s even more confusing is that some song titles have been translated. Queen’s “One year of love” is shown as “愛ある日々”. The karaoke center didn’t do those translations themselves, as these tracks are written like that on the track listing too.

Unfortunately this particular Karaoke meet-up doesn’t exist anymore, but there a more than half a dozen similar ones listed at meetup.com