FOR A MAN who lost out on one of music's biggest earners, Daisuke Inoue is in fine form with a toothy smile spread over the big, rough-hewn face of a natural comedian. The good humour comes in useful for interviews when he's inevitably asked if he regrets not patenting the world's first karaoke machine, which he invented in 1971. After 34 years, during which his unlikely contraption has conquered every corner of the globe, accompanied by the sound of a billion strangled, drink-sodden voices, the question must sound like the whistling of an approaching bomb. But the smile stays. 'I'm not an inventor,' says the 65-year-old in his small Osaka office. 'I simply put things that already exist together, which is completely different. I took a car stereo, a coin box and a small amplifier to make the karaoke. Who would even consider patenting something like that?' 'Some people say he lost US$150 million,' says Inoue's friend and local academic Robert Scott Field. 'If it was me I'd be crying in the corner, but he's a happy guy who loves people. I think it blows his mind to find that he has touched so many people's lives.' Thanks to TV specials and a recently released movie biopic, many in Japan now know that Inoue was a rhythmically challenged drummer in a dodgy Kobe covers band when he hit on the idea of pre- recording his backing tracks. The group spent years learning to make drunken businessmen sound vaguely in tune by following rather than leading - and drowning out the worst of the vocals. So when the boss of a steel firm asked Inoue to record a tape for a company trip to a hot springs resort, he knew a few tricks of the trade. Karaoke, or empty orchestra, was born. Inoue and his friends gave it a leg up by making more tapes and leasing machines to bars around Kobe. Taking the machines for a spin cost 100 yen ($7) a pop - the price of three or four drinks in 1971 - and Inoue never thought it would make it out of the city. Yet by the 1980s, karaoke was one of the few words that required no translation across much of Asia. An emerging China embraced it, and Hong Kong sent a transformed version back to Japan as karaoke boxes, small booths where friends and family could torture each other in soundproofed bliss. Inoue languished for years in obscurity. But that changed in 1999, after karaoke had stomped noisily into the US and Europe, when Time astonishingly named him one of the 20th century's most influential Asians. He 'had helped to liberate legions of the once unvoiced: as much as Mao Zedong or Mohandas Gandhi changed Asian days, Inoue transformed its nights', the magazine said. 'Nobody was as surprised as me,' he says. Last year, Inoue was given the Ig Nobel Peace Prize in Harvard University, a joke award presented by real Nobel winners. He received a standing ovation after attempting a wobbly version of The New Seekers' 70s Coca-Cola anthem I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, calling himself the 'last samurai'. Nobel laureates in turn (or in revenge) murdered the Andy Williams' standard Can't Take My Eyes Off You. Inoue loved it, laughing throughout. 'I wish I spoke English,' he says. 'It would make life easier, and I could go to the US again, do speaking tours and make some money.' Now he's the subject of a new fictionalised movie account of his life, called simply Karaoke. Directed by Hiroyuki Tsuji, it's on release in Japan and stars an actor considerably better-looking than the plump, weathered drummer of 1971. 'At least they got someone tall to play me,' Inoue says. A typical Osaka businessman - amiable, fast-talking and with a slightly untamable air - Inoue once tried working in a proper company but baulked at wearing the salaryman's uniform: a suit. 'I looked like a rocker and it didn't go down very well. I wasn't cut out for that life.' He didn't use a karaoke machine until he was 59, but loves to listen to pre-60s ballads; his favourite English songs are Love is a Many Splendored Thing and Ray Charles' I Can't Stop Loving You. 'They're easy to sing, which is good because I can't sing at all,' he says. Inoue is often tormented by daft questions, but takes them all in his stride. 'People approach me all the time and ask me if I can help their husbands sing better,' he says. 'And I always say the same thing: if the singer was any good, he would be a pro and be making a living at it. He's bad because he's like the rest of us. So we might as well 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 office, helps bring his concepts to life. In the 80s, he ran a company that managed to persuade dozens of small production firms to lease songs for eight-track karaoke machines. But in the early 90s, laser and dial-up technology left the firm behind the game. Not everyone thanks Inoue for his invention. Karaoke Terror, a Japanese movie released last year, depicts a bunch of bored, middle-aged women and a group of college kids going to war over their obsession with karaoke, destroying a city in the process - karaoke as an almost too-easy metaphor for the emptiness of contemporary Japanese culture. But the pony-tailed businessman believes the little box he put together in Kobe has done far more good than harm. 'As something that improves the mood, and helps people who hate each other lighten up, it's had a huge social impact, especially in Japan,' he says. 'Japanese people are shy, but at weddings and company get-togethers, the karaoke comes out and people drink a little and relax. It breaks the ice. 'It's used for treating depression and loneliness. Go to old people's homes and hospitals around the country and there is a karaoke machine. I keep hearing of places where karaoke is huge - like Russia - and it's used as therapy. It makes people happy everywhere. When I see the happy faces of people singing karaoke, I'm delighted.' The biopic supports the idea that karaoke is socially useful, rather than the bane of quiet drinkers everywhere. Starting with a grim list of suicide statistics among Japanese men, the movie depicts a salaryman losing his job, wife and son after he's fired. He discovers karaoke and finds a new purpose in life. 'We went to see the movie together,' says Field. 'They got this good-looking actor and actress to play him and his wife, so he was really happy. Afterwards he said: 'I get letters and e-mails from all over the world and now they've made a movie of my life story. I have to pinch myself. You can't buy things like that.''