Karaoke King

If anyone has seen "Lost In Translation", then they know that the Japanese are pretty into Karaoke (the word itself translates as "Empty Orchestra" so I believe). Well, last night i managed to experience this first hand. Some of the MD PhD students in the department here asked a couple of us if we wanted to go to a karaoke evening at a bar downtown called The Upper Level (I think - it may be The Upper Deck) which they described as something of a dive (it's certainly not a place to dress up to) so two of the Japanese guys here Kaz and Moto (the new guy), and myself decided to head along and see what the fuss was about. Whilst the bar isn't the smartest of places, the atmosphere was good and, from my point of view, it was great - i.e. they had Guinness and Stella Artois on draught so there actually something good to drink.

Of course, inevitably, we all trooped up to sing (minus Kaz) and got into the spirit of it all. My two songs were "Common People" by Pulp and "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club. The former went down pretty well, i have to say - I certainly attempted to make my British accent as common as possible! But the undoubted star of the night had to be Moto. We were all wondering how he would be able to sing in English, given his spoken English isn't brilliant - but that didn't seem to be a problem. Singing "The Power of Love" and "Satisfaction", he really got into it and bought the house down. Everybody absolutely loved him! (I believe he even got bought a couple of drinks for it as well). So will we be back there next week? Hmmm, what do you guys think?