In Alhambra, a high-ranking Asian gang member was shot and killed outside a karaoke club in August. Karaoke also is getting a bad name in the valley, where several cities-including El Monte and Arcadia-are pulling the plug on it because of crime problems. Americans even mangle the word and say “carry-oki,” rather than use the Japanese pronunciation, “ca-da-o-kay” (the same way that the Japanese say “be-su-bo-ru” for “baseball”). There are more than 15,000 establishments that offer karaoke, literally “empty orchestra” in Japanese, and the industry is expected to pull in about $590 million this year, according to the Simi Valley-based Karaoke International Sing-Along Assn.īut, American karaoke is in English. It’s not hard to find a karaoke bar or club in America these days, either. Karaoke, in which people are supplied with a microphone and recorded backup music so they can ham it up in bars and clubs, has taken off in the past 10 years in Japan. To think about singing karaoke in English, they say, is like trying to picture a geisha in a biker bar-it just doesn’t fit. In the San Gabriel Valley and elsewhere around Southern California, second- or third-generation Japanese-Americans-some of whom don’t speak or understand Japanese-are learning about a cultural craze from their ancestral homeland. That was the pre-recorded Supremes-like back-up girls who chirped: “Makes me feel hap-py.makes me feel fi-ine.” Higashi, a Japanese-American who was born and raised in Hawaii, sings his karaoke in Japanese-thank you very much-even though he speaks only English.
But, oh, no, not the rest of the English that wouldn’t be right. Harry Higashi, 70, warbled those words, all right. The phrase in question is “ti-ny bu-bbles.”
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