Inventor of ‘Sparko Box’ – the first karaoke machine

SHIGEICHI NEGISHI: 1923 - 2024

Shigeichi Negishi, who has died aged 100, was the inventor of the karaoke machine, the electronic singalong system that became a cultural phenomenon in his native Japan before spreading across the world.

The owner of a small factory in suburban Tokyo assembling 8-track car stereos, Negishi – like a great many Japanese men – had always enjoyed singing for relaxation. The term karaoke, a contraction of “empty” and “orchestra”, originally referred to entertainers who sang to recorded backing tracks, and Negishi himself was a devotee of a sing-along morning radio programme in a similar vein called Pop Songs Without Lyrics.

Shigeichi Negishi, inventor of karaoke, photographed in 2018.Credit: Matt Alt

One day in 1967, when his chief engineer overheard him and told him jokingly that he was not very tuneful, he had the idea of attaching a microphone to a tape deck so he could hear himself over a recording of the radio show.

“Piece of cake, boss,” the engineer replied, and three days later, he delivered a simple prototype. Negishi tested it by crooning a popular ballad called Mujo no Yume (“the Heartless Dream”), and they elaborated the design into the coin-operated “Sparko Box,” an 18-inch cube with chrome fittings and multicoloured flashing lights that played selected instrumental recordings on cassette tapes, with printed lyrics provided.

“It works! That’s all I was thinking,” Negishi told Matt Alt, author of Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World, many years later. “Most of all, it was fun! I knew right away I’d invented something new.”

The small bars and eateries favoured by Japan’s hard-drinking after-work “salarymen” and the short-time “love hotels” favoured by romancing couples offered a ready market, while many customers also installed Sparko Boxes at home. Though he met strong resistance from nagashi – itinerant guitarists whose traditional role was to accompany singing drinkers – Negishi sold 8,000 of the machines before deciding to pull out of the karaoke market in 1975.

Australian Karaoke World Champion 2009 Dina David.

At that time, the trend was still in its infancy. Twenty years later, it was claimed that almost half of Japan’s 125 million population regularly sang karaoke. In what has been estimated as a $10 billion global industry, the habit and the increasingly sophisticated equipment spread throughout Chinese-speaking Asia as well as to expatriate Japanese venues the world over, where many an embarrassed Western guest has been cajoled into howling Frank Sinatra’s My Way.

Negishi never registered a patent, however, and in due course, there were several other claimants to karaoke fame – notably Daisuke Inoue, a nightclub musician from Kobe who launched his own machine, the “8 Juke”, in 1971. But Negishi’s Sparko Box is recognised and saluted, not least by the All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association, as the authentic blueprint of the concept.

The son of a local official, Shigeichi Negishi was born on November 29, 1923, in Itabashi, a northern satellite of Tokyo. As a boy, he made cardboard cityscapes and won a national calligraphy competition. He studied economics at Hosei University before being conscripted for military service and spent two years as a prisoner of war in Singapore after the Japanese surrender in 1945.

After returning to Japan, Negishi worked as a camera salesman before establishing his own business, Nichiden Kogyo, in 1956 to assemble transistor radios and other consumer electronic products for larger manufacturers.

An inveterate entrepreneur, he went on to launch several other businesses after the Sparko Box, including a line of electronic Buddhist talking prayer books. He also continued to enjoy karaoke singing.

According to his daughter, he was never concerned by the absence of a patent that might have made his fortune. “He felt a lot of pride in seeing his idea evolve into a culture of having fun through song around the world.” He is survived by three children.

The Telegraph, London.