Interview with karaoke inventor
Mr Inoue is tormented by daft questions, but takes them in his stride. “People approach me all the time and ask me if I can’t help their husbands sing better, and I always say the same thing. If the singer was any good, he would be a pro and make a living at it. He’s bad because he’s like the rest of us. So we might as well just sit back and enjoy it.”
These days, he makes a living selling, among other things, an eco-friendly detergent and a cockroach repellent for karaoke machines. “Cockroaches get inside the machines and build nests, chew on the wires,” he says. Friends say he is the ideas man, while his wife, who works in the same Osaka office, helps bring them to life.
That’s part of an extensive interview with Daisuke Inoue in the May 24, 2006 Independent. Mr Inoue was awarded the 2004 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.