Top-ranking songs have average age of over 30 years old.
For foreigners living in Japan, speaking in Japanese is obviously a big part of adapting to the local lifestyle, but so is singing in Japanese. Develop much of a social life in Japan, and eventually you’re going to wind up at a karaoke box with friends, and while most of them offer English songs too, you cold make an argument that you haven’t really had the full karaoke in Japan experience until you’ve sung karaoke in Japanese.
So what Japanese songs are Japan’s foreign population singing? To investigate, for-foreigners employment site Yolo Work conducted a survey of 369 foreign residents in Japan, asking them “What Japanese song do you often sing at karaoke?”, with the results producing the following top five list.
5 (tie). “Yuki no Hana” (Mika Nakashima)
5 (tie). “Mayonaka no Door～Stay with Me” (Miki Matsubara)
Though they finished at the same ranking, there’s a 24-year-gap between Mika Nakashima’s plaintive winter ballad from 2003 and Miki Matsubara’s more up-tempo, but still filled with longing, city pop classic from 1979. Something they both have in common, though, is being extensively covered by artists elsewhere in Asia, with covers for “Mayonaka no Door” coming as part of the surge in international interest in Japanese city pop that started a few years ago.
4. “We Are!” (Hiroshi Kitadani)
It’s pretty easy to guess how “We Are!” made the list. In the course of its 25-years-and-counting broadcast run, there have been a lot of opening themes for the One Piece TV anime, but none of them have left as deep an impression on the franchise’s international fanbase as the original, sung by Hiroshi Kitadani and first heard in 1999.
3. “Ue wo Muite Arukou” (Kyu Sakamoto)
The most golden of golden J-pop oldies, 1961’s “Ue wo Muite Arukou,” which translates loosely to “Keep Your Head Up and Keep on Walking,” is better known in English-speaking countries as “Sukiyaki” or “The Sukiyaki Song.” Arguably the biggest international success ever of a Japanese song not directly linked to a specific media tie-in or broad Japanese pop culture boom, “Ue wo Muite Arukou’s” relaxed, easy-to-sing-to rhythm and relatively non-challenging vocabulary also make it a favorite of singalong lessons in overseas classes for students learning Japanese, and that familiarity probably helped contribute to its number-three ranking.
2. “Dry Flower” (Yuuri)
The 2022 breakout hit of singer/songwriter Yuuri, “Dry Flower” also has a popular cover, this time performed by the original artist himself. Add in the Japanese version sitting at the top of Oricon’s karaoke popularity ranking for three years running, and “Dry Flower” is currently riding the cyclical trend of exposure leading to karaoke picks leading back to more exposure and more picks.
1. “First Love” (Utada Hikaru)
And at the top of the list we come to an unquestionably evergreen karaoke pick. Since its release in 1999, Utada Hikaru’s signature ballad hasn’t really dipped at all in reverence, and it’s a song that just about anyone of karaoke-going age, from teenage students to mature adults, will instantly recognize. Yolo Work credits Netflix’s 2022 series First Love, which drew inspiration from the song and borrowed its title with giving it a boost in the foreigner karaoke rankings, but the fact is that it’s pretty much impossible to have spent very much time listening to J-pop medleys or recommendation paylists at any time in the past two and a half decades and not stumble across the undeniably memorable “First Love.”
Looking over the list, it is a little surprising to see only one song from the 2020s in the top five/six, and those songs’ average age works out to 30.2 years. In terms of nationality of respondents for the survey, 20.6 hail from the Philippines, 8.7 from Brazil, 7.3 from the U.S.A., 6 percent from Indonesia, and 3.5 percent from Nepal, so it’s possible a more North American/European-centered poll would yield different results.
Source: PR Times, Yolo Work
Top image: Pakutaso
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