Daisuke Inoue

is a Japanese businessman best known as an inventor of the karaoke machine. Inoue, a musician in his youth employed in backing businesspeople who wanted to sing in bars, invented the machine as a means of allowing them to sing without live back-up. He did not patent the machine and so did not directly profit, but he continued to work in the industry it generated, including patenting a protective pesticide for karaoke machines. Named one of Time magazine's "Most Influential Asians of the Century" in 1999, he was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and in 2005 was the subject of the Japanese biographical film Karaoke.

Recent studies have revealed the existence of several people who invented and commercialized karaoke machines prior to Inoue.

Life and career

Daisuke Inoue was born in Osaka, Japan on May 10, 1940. He was raised in Nishinomiya, the son of a pancake vendor with a stall behind a train station. He started playing drums in high school, but was not particularly skillful, as a result of which he took on the business management of his band, which provided back-up music in a club for businessmen who wanted to take the stage. A Filipino, Roberto del Rosario filed a patent for a karaoke machine system, the Sing Along System, which del Rosario developed in 1975. Inoue did continue in the field, inventing a pesticide to repel cockroaches and rats that destroy the electronics within karaoke machines. Subsequently, Inoue launched the All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association.

In 2004, Inoue went to Harvard University to accept an Ig Nobel Peace Prize for "inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other." His rendition there of "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" earned a standing ovation.

In 2005, director Hiroyuki Tsuji released a fictionalized biographic film of Inoue called Karaoke.