Shigeichi Negishi, the Japanese businessman who invented the first karaoke machine, died on January 26. The Wall Street Journal References. Tokyo-based Negishi was 100 years old.
Journalist Matt Alt, who interviewed Negishi for his book Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern Worldreported the news at X and expanded on Negishi's legacy in an obituary for The Wall Street Journal. Negishi's daughter confirmed her father's death to Alt, stating that he died of natural causes after a fall.
Negishi was the head of an electronics company when he first envisioned what would become the Sparko Box – a blueprint for the universally loved karaoke machine. Legend has it that Negishi was singing to himself as he walked into his office one day in 1967. After an employee made fun of his understatement, Negishi realized that he would surely sound better with the help of a backing track.
Negishi, who enjoyed singing along to radio and television programs, eventually had an employee put together a speaker, tape deck, and microphone, testing the original with an instrumental version of Yoshio Kodama's “Mujo no Yume.” After a test run, he took the MacGyvered machine home and “threw the first karaoke party ever with his wife and kids,” as Alt put it.
In an interview with Alt, Negishi discussed how he named his central invention. Negishi first suggested “karaoke”, a contraction of the Japanese words for “empty” and “orchestra”. His distributor, however, did not allow it, saying that “the karaoke sounded too much like a kanoke”—which means coffin. The Sparko Box was born.
Although Negishi never patented the Sparko Box, he spent a period as a traveling salesman for the machine, driving around Japan and showing off his invention in bars, restaurants and hotels. He sold around 8,000 Sparko Boxes during this period, but finally ended his efforts in 1975.
While there were a few Japanese inventors who created similar gadgets before the widespread karaoke boom of the 1980s and 90s, Negishi's Sparko Box predated them all. Even Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue, who created a similar gizmo called the 8 Juke, was four years behind the Sparko Box.
Alt reports that Negishi's family is keeping track of the only Sparko Box that remains and is still working.
