Half of the word karaoke is English. It just spent some time in Japan before coming back.
The word has two parts. Kara is a native Japanese word meaning "empty." Oke is a clipped form of ōkesutora, which is the English word "orchestra" borrowed into Japanese and fitted to Japanese sounds. Put together, karaoke means "empty orchestra": the band is there, but the place where the singer should be is left open for you.
That makes karaoke a rare kind of round trip. The Saturday Evening Post calls it a partial reborrowing: English lent Japan a word, and Japan sent back a new word built partly from it. To English speakers it looks completely foreign.
English dictionaries disagree slightly on the date it arrived. Merriam-Webster gives 1977 as the first known use. Etymonline dates it to 1979. Either way, the word reached English about a decade after the first machines.
Who built the first of those machines is its own argument. Wikipedia reports that the nightclub musician Daisuke Inoue said, in a 1996 interview, that he built a karaoke-style machine in Kobe in 1971. He called it the 8 Juke, and he never patented it. In 2004 he received the tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel Peace Prize for inventing karaoke.
But Inoue was not alone. Shigeichi Negishi, a Tokyo electronics maker, said he had built a sing-along machine in 1967. IEEE Spectrum reports that a colleague teased him for singing out of tune, which gave him the idea. His machine used an 8-track player and a microphone, and in 2025 the IEEE honored it as a Milestone.
Negishi's first model was called the Music Box. By 1969 a coin-operated version was on sale as the Sparko Box, not as a karaoke machine. According to Wikipedia, he avoided the word because karaoke sounded too much like kan'oke, the Japanese word for "coffin."
The kara in karaoke has a famous cousin in English. Karate is kara plus te, "hand," so it means "empty hand": fighting without weapons. English borrowed karate in 1947, about three decades before karaoke. The two words share an idea as well as a syllable. Karate is combat with nothing in your hands, and karaoke is music with nobody at the microphone.