Week one in Japan has been filled with invaluable lessons and experiences, all of which relate to at least one of the three themes of Imagining the Global in some way or another. Examples of the local-global dyad are not only found inside of the classroom and during structured activities, but we can also find ourselves examining the blurred lines between “the local” and “the global” in the flashing lights of a Tokyo karaoke bar. After a full day of lectures about everything from tourism to the geology of Mt. Fuji and a lovely formal reception at Nihon University, some of the local students invited us to join them at their favorite karaoke venue. Even in the midst of throwbacks from the early 2000s, we found ourselves questioning the distinctions between what was Japanese, what was American, and what was “global.”
The local-global dyad encourages us to ask these kinds of questions without simply assuming that araoke is a purely Japanese experience and that Rihannah’s pop hit Umbrella is a uniquely American one. Karaoke may have originated in Japan and has remained popular across the country, but it would be wrong to say that this is a strictly local experience. Through time and the process of globalization, karaoke has become a form of entertainment for people all over the world. However, despite the global trends of karaoke, it remains an important part of the local Japanese culture. Additionally, through a similar process of globalization, music from all over the world is readily available to a large majority of the global population. The far-reaching, global pop culture has disseminated songs and artists in such a way that allows Lewis & Clark students from Portland, Oregon, USA and Nihon University students from Tokyo, Japan to come together and know every word to every song by the London-based band One Direction. Despite the fact that many of us are only just beginning our study of the Japanese language, and despite the limited English spoken by our new Japanese friends, we were able to bond over our global experience of music in a Tokyo karaoke bar.
Of course, ideas relating the local and the global haven’t all been ponderings during Tokyo nightlife activities; some key authors that we have read in the past week help to contextualize these globalized experiences. In particular, the author of “A Global Sense of Place” refers to space-time compression, which is the “movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching-out of social relations, and to our experience of all this” (Massey, 1991). This paper is an excellent example of coming to terms with modernity and finding the uniqueness of place despite the forces of globalization. Though the dominating force of globalization has brought a group of students from the United States to Japan and activities like karaoke to the rest of the world and music from every corner of the earth to the karaoke bar we happened upon one night in Tokyo, globalization has not completely homogenized the globe. For example, at the end of the night we concluded our karaoke experience with the unique Japanese tradition of a single clap as we bid our new friends goodbye for the night. This mix of different cultures and different people from different places helped us realize the true uniqueness of the place we had found and the places from which we had come. The combination of things foreign and familiar made us recognize the local within the global.
Massey, D., “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today 35 (1991): 24-29