The Japanese daisuke inoue was named in 1999 by the magazine TEAM as one of the “most influential Asians of the century”. However, his life has passed on the fringes of fame, to which he jumped only in Asia.
And it is that in the early 1970s, Inoue devised a device that managed to transcend generations: the karaoke Machine, the assisted singing device described as "a whole new way for people to learn to tolerate each other."
Daisuke was born near Kobe, a city known for its exquisite meat a little south of osaka, and began his career as a hiki-katari, one of the musicians who support the Salaryman (low-ranking Japanese executives who dedicate their entire lives to the same company) who frequented bars specialized in singing.
Daisuke's invention, the 8 machine Juke. Source: The appendix
Inoue was a drummer in a band, but he soon made a name for himself due to his extraordinary skills, "Dr. Sing-along", as, more than other ensembles, he and his entourage became intensely involved with taken executives, cheering them on. to sing and celebrate, growing the atmosphere of the place like nowhere else.
Soon, the demand for the doctor was so great that, when a regular client asked him to back him up during a business trip, Inoue was unable to attend, making a tape that helped the man continue to have fun on his trip, becoming a sensation that it would not take long to gather a strong demand.
In this way, Inoue began to think that this idea might have widespread appeal. So he developed a machine called 8 jukesbasically a Jukebox inverted, which without knowing it, was the first karaoke machine.
“Usually in our lives, we see the stars through media. All of us want to be stars ourselves. With a microphone in your hand, you can be a star”, says the man who invented the first karaoke machine, Daisuke Inoue.
When Daisuke created the first Juke 8, a brother-in-law suggested he get a patent, but at the time he didn't think it was more than a way to make a little quick buck. However, over the years, the triumph was brutal and the request exceeded the same inventor.
Having assembled his invention from off-the-shelf components, he did not believe there was anything patentable about it, and unknown to him, at least one similar device had already been built elsewhere in the world. Japan. Soon, with each passing day, the calls were fewer and fewer, leaving him with no money and no patent.
Despite the blow, and the fact that the creator himself says that karaoke would not have grown as it did if he had carried it out, what Inoue invented was “the total package of custom hardware and software that allowed karaoke to happen from being a local fad to a huge global business.”
Whether Inoue's patent would have had such profound effects on the fantasy lives of Japanese and Westerners as it did in the end, karaoke will forever remain a mystery, but nothing can take away from the Japanese the credit for creating a machine that made the world sing, since it was the University of Harvard in 2004 that gave Daisuke the ig award Peace Nobel which recognizes particularly strange and ridiculous developments in cscience, technology and culture, for "inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other."
Today, the it is known throughout the world, although Inoue never claimed to have invented the name as such. What is certain is that karaoke is one of the biggest success stories of Japan. The global karaoke market is estimated to be worth nearly $10 billion.