Inoue Daisuke
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Inoue Daisuke invented the karaoke machine in 1971 but never bothered to patent it, losing his chance to become one of Japan's richest men. For a man who lost out on one of music's biggest paychecks, Daisuke is surprisingly still blessed with a good sense of humour.
Daisuke was born 10 May 1940 in Osaka. He likes to describe his invention as "taking a car stereo, a coin box and a small amp to make the karaoke". Daisuke was a rhythmically challenged drummer in a Kobe covers band when he hit on the idea of pre-recording his own backing tracks. The band had spent years learning how to make drunken businessmen sound in tune by following rather than leading, and drowning out the worst of the damage, so Daisuke knew the tricks of the trade when the boss of a steel firm asked him to record a tape for a company trip to a hot springs resort.
Karaoke (meaning empty orchestra) in its current format has its origin when Daisuke and his friends gave it a leg up into the world by making more tapes and leasing machines to bars around Kobe. By the 1980s, karaoke was one of the few words that required no translation across much of Asia. China embraced it, and Hong Kong sent it back to Japan as karaoke boxes, small booths where friends and family could out-croon each other in soundproofed bliss.
Daisuke languished for years in international obscurity. But in 1999, after karaoke had stomped noisily into the United States and Europe, Time Magazine astonishingly called him one of the 20th Century's most influential Asians, saying he "had helped to liberate legions of the once unvoiced: as much as Mao Zedong or Mohandas Gandhi changed Asian days, Daisuke transformed its nights."
Daisuke was presented the Ig Nobel Peace Prize at Harvard University, a joke award presented by the American science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research and featuring real Nobel Prize winners. The committee cited him for "providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other". He received a standing ovation after calling himself the "last samurai" and attempted a wobbly version of the 1970s Coca-Cola anthem "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing". The Nobel laureates in turn (or in revenge) murdered the Frankie Valli standard "Can't Take My Eyes Off You".
These days Daisuke makes a living selling, among other things, an eco-friendly detergent and a cockroach repellent for karaoke machines. "Cockroaches get inside the machines, build nests and chew on the wires," he explained. Friends say he is the ideas man, while his wife, who works in the same Osaka office, helps bring them to life.
Karaoke is used as therapy to make people happy everywhere. There is a strong case that karaoke is socially useful, rather than the bane of quiet pint-drinkers.
