Daisuke Inoue and the First Karaoke Machine

In Kobe's Sannomiya district, sometime between 1969 and 1971, a regular bar customer made an unusual request of a young drummer named Daisuke Inoue. Sannomiya packed roughly four thousand drinking establishments into about a one kilometre radius, and within that crush Inoue had built a reputation as a hiki katari, a Dr. Sing along, for his knack of retuning songs live to match a singer's ability and sobriety. The client was heading to a company retreat and wanted Inoue to come along and play piano while he sang for his colleagues. Inoue could not leave his own club shift to join him. Instead of turning the man away, he sat down and recorded an instrumental tape the client could carry on the trip himself. It was not the first time Inoue had sung along to a track alone in 1969, but this was the first time he had handed that experience to someone else on cassette. The tape worked. The man returned able to perform in front of coworkers with no band behind him at all, just Inoue's recorded accompaniment. Word of it spread among the salarymen who drank in Sannomiya's bars, men used to paying Inoue directly for his live backing. If a tape could do what Inoue's hands had done for years, there was no reason it had to stay a favor done for one traveling client.