Around 25 people gathered in Horner Hall at the Hot Springs Convention Center on July 15 to help the Hot Springs Sister City Program record a karaoke video for Hot Springs' sister city, Hanamaki, Japan.
The group spent an hour and a half learning, practicing and then performing the Japanese song "Only One" by SMAP.
"It turned out much better than I ever dreamed it would," Mary Zunick, executive director of the program, said. "Learning a song with Japanese lyrics is as complicated as it sounds like it would be."
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Zunick said they had planned to actually do karaoke with the song, but couldn't find a karaoke version that was understandable for English speakers. "The original thought that would be very easy would be to have a karaoke type experience where the words were on the screen and you would just sing along phonetically," she said.
All karaoke versions they found were "in Japanese characters, not in characters that we could sound out, so we had to use sheet music instead of on the screen," she said.
The video will be sent to Hanamaki in an effort to strengthen the bond between the sister cities, Zunick said, noting the original idea for the video was for it to be used for tourists to the Tokyo Olympics.
"We were recording a video to send to Hanamaki, our sister city. They were selected as an Arigato Host Town as part of the Olympics in Japan originally scheduled for summer 2020," she said, "and the original thought was visitors and athletes to Japan would travel to these Arigato Host Cities to visit real Japan."
While tourist travel to Japan will not happen, the government still encouraged the videos to be made for the betterment of the relationships between sister cities.