YOKOHAMA, JAPAN -- Except for the five fat binders with no words that are occasionally passed from table to table, Rieko Mizuno's karaoke bar appears to be just like any other.
Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of these drinking joints are squeezed between storefronts and hidden away down every alley in this old port. Often fitting fewer than a dozen people, they are the tiny tributaries of what is known as the water trade: the flowing, floating, world that lubricates the lonely corners of introverted Japanese lives.
Most lives, that is. The five volumes at Rieko Mizuno's place each contain 120 songs, laboriously transcribed by Ms. Mizuno into Braille. She is the only "mama-san," or "proprietor," in the country who is blind, and her bar provides a place for voices, and for people, who in the past went unheard.
That her bar can exist at all is evidence of what is good about this society. Robbers are almost unheard of, and neither employees nor customers cheat on the bar tabs.
Yet Ms. Mizuno's unique status underscores a harsher reality as well. Japan's vaunted egalitarianism, its ability to provide an inclusive society for all citizens, typically does not extend to the handicapped, for whom much of the country and its culture is inaccessible.
Public transportation and buildings offer no special arrangements. For those who are born blind, the choice of vocation is limited to acupuncture or massage, Ms. Mizuno said. She pursued an alternative path because her sight faded slowly, disappearing entirely only after she began high school.
After learning Braille, she worked for years at a library doing transcription. Twelve years ago, she put all her money into remodeling the upstairs of her home into a "nomiya," or "drinking shop," naming it after a now-deceased guide dog, Bobu.
She loved to sing, and karaoke, introduced in the early 1970s, was becoming very popular by the 1980s.
"For the visually impaired," she said, "it provided a reason for living."
Today, her world spans six aging, velour-covered stools at the bar and three tiny tables that fill up the remaining space. Seventy-five bottles of Suntory Royal Whiskey in varying stages of consumption -- each owned by a regular customer --have places of honor on a shelf. A TV screen showing the words and images of karaoke songs is mounted high on a wall.
Small and agile, Ms. Mizuno sidesteps the clutter, pausing to talk to familiar customers, remembering with a touch any minute shift in the furniture.
"I know every detail here," she said. "Away from my home, I'm lost."
She sings many songs by heart. For others, she reads the words with her fingers and follows a tune that has been heard many times before. The method is used by the half-dozen other regular patrons who are also blind, and by others who may drop in, having been passed a Braille business card that provides directions. Anyone who wants to sing, blind or not, waits a turn.
"No one is treated differently here," Ms. Mizuno said.
Customers at Bobu's seem to make no special allowances for the mama-san. Mokota Hasaka, a blast furnace operator with the steel company NKK, says, after all, Bobu's is only five minutes from home. He heard about the place from an acquaintance who has a similar affection for karaoke, and now he comes once a week. "It's inexpensive," he says. "And it's where I find my friends."
Koboru Ewamoto drops by perhaps twice a month. During the day, he's an electrical engineer working on street lights; at night, he likes to sing. As he looks at a first-time crooner attempting to make her way through "The Sounds of Silence" when genuine silence would have been preferable, he smiles kindly and says, "There's a warm mood. You meet people, hear people, you didn't know. And then you can talk to them."
Lost in the world of voices are whatever problems come with an inability to see. The uniqueness of Bobu's is known, if not acknowledged. Much in Japan is left unsaid.
A truck driver named Shiro Kato rarely speaks while at the bar. Just outside the door, he's a bit more open.
Ms. Mizuno's "a very, very amazing women," he says on his way down the stairs.
"Be gentle," he implores.