Japanese inventor of karaoke dies at 100, but his first machine lives on

Shigeichi Negishi created the Sparko Box sing-along device in 1967, inadvertently starting a global phenomenon

Since its invention in 1967, karaoke has become an integral part of Japanese culture. AFP

Hold the microphones at half-mast, the inventor of the karaoke machine has died, writer Matt Alt has reported on his social media platforms.

Shigeichi Negishi, a Japanese engineer who invented a machine that sparked endless joy and nights of raucous singing and led to a global phenomenon, was 100 at the time of his death.

Though the news was only made public yesterday, Negishi died on Jan 26 from natural causes after suffering a fall, his daughter Atsumi Takano revealed to Alt.

The idea for the karaoke machine came to Negishi in 1967 after a colleague quipped that he had a terrible singing voice. In his mind he thought, “If only they could hear my voice over a backing track!”, according to Alt's obituary in The Wall Street Journal, published last night.

To the rest of the world, the invention of the first karaoke machine has long been attributed to Daisuke Inoue, a nightclub musician who was thought of as the pioneer of the technology. But in Japan, Negishi has long been considered the father of the invention.

Negishi’s machine was called the Sparko Box, coming to market in 1967, four years before Inoue’s, which was called the 8 Juke.

Born in 1923, Negishi was conscripted to the Japanese military and was subsequently a prisoner of war in various camps in Singapore. After being released, he returned to Japan and used the English language skills he picked up as a POW to sell cameras.

By 1967, Negishi was running an electronics company in Tokyo. He had often enjoyed singing along to music on television and wondered how good he would sound with a backing track.

He instructed a staff member in his company to put together a device with a microphone, speaker and tape deck. The first song he played on this new device was an instrumental version of Mujo no Yume (The Heartless Dream), by Yoshio Kodama.

After being impressed with the results, Negishi took the contraption home to show his family, accidentally starting the first karaoke session.

And while he was primarily the creative mind behind the new machine, Negishi also instantly understood the commercial potential for it, too.

When it came time to name the new device, Negishi chose the word karaoke, which had long been used in Japan to refer to singers who used backing tracks to perform. The word itself is a mixture of the worlds “empty” and “orchestra” in Japanese.

Unfortunately for Negishi at the time, he invented something brilliant a little bit ahead of the curve, as selling his Sparko Box machine proved to be more difficult than he envisioned.

The machine required instrumental tapes, and lots of them. He also faced pushback from “nagashi”, or wandering guitarists, who felt that the machine was taking away from their income at bars and nightclubs.

Even as bar and nightclub owners took to the machines, purchasing them for patron use, they were forced by nagashi to remove them.

Negishi thought of patenting the box, something that would have earned him a high income as the popularity of karaoke blew up in Japan and around the world, but he decided against it, thinking it would be too much of a hassle to get a patent.

The popularity of karaoke grew exponentially in Japan in the 1970s. Dedicated karaoke bars sprouted by the dozen, and many people bought their own machines to use at home. By the 1980s, it was nearly everywhere.

By the 1980s, karaoke had become a cultural phenomenon in Japan, even installed in taxis. AP

Remarkably, the original Sparko Box still works today. The quality of the build and the simplicity of its parts means it can still be used, as demonstrated by Negishi himself in 2020 during an interview with Alt for pop culture site Kotaku.

Negishi’s ingenuity and his karaoke invention are a marker of a time when Japan was both beginning to recover from the Second World War and moving out into the world, strapped with ideas.

Today, karaoke is popular the world over and is one of Japan’s most beloved cultural exports. There is even a Karaoke World Championship that has been held every year since 2003.