Japan’s karaoke bars adapt to the Covid era

Back in early April, during that brief phase when lockdown felt more like an unexplored alien planet than the inescapable traffic jam it soon became, I called Japan’s biggest karaoke operators to see what they made of it all. Principally, I wanted to know what sort of tech they planned to throw at a problem that, on an early reading, seemed destined to put them all out of business. There was, I now realise, something visceral about those calls. It was not that, within a couple of weeks, the karaoke pangs of friends and contacts were overpowering. And it wasn’t that the plight of Japan’s tens of thousands of karaoke establishments particularly stood out in a crisis that forced favourite bars and restaurants to close and caused the whole Japanese economy to shrink a record 7.8 per cent in that very quarter.