Yukinobu Chai

Every other maker in this series learned the craft from someone. They served an apprenticeship, swept a floor, watched a master thin a soundboard and were corrected when they got it wrong. Yukinobu Chai did none of that. While still a university student he decided to build a violin, built one, and went on from there entirely on his own. Nine years after opening his own shop he started making classical guitars, and by the time he died in 2011 the workshop he founded in Machida had produced several generations of instruments known across Japan for one quality above all others: they were honestly built, from the cheapest student model to the top of the range.

A Violin at University

Chai was born in 1931. The founding story of the workshop begins not with a guitar but with a violin — one he made as a student, with no teacher, apparently out of nothing more than the wish to find out whether he could.

It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. A violin is the least forgiving instrument a beginner can attempt: carved arching on both plates, a graduated thickness measured in tenths of a millimetre, a soundpost whose position shifts the entire voice of the instrument, and a scroll that will expose any weakness in a carver’s hand. Most makers come to it after years at a bench under supervision. Chai came to it as an experiment and finished it.

He remained self-taught for the rest of his working life. Everything he knew about how wood moves, how a top should be thinned, how a neck should be set, he worked out himself — which goes a long way towards explaining the particular stubbornness of the methods he settled on.

Tamagawa-Gakuen, 1959

In 1959 Chai opened his own workshop in Machida, on the western edge of Tokyo — a few minutes’ walk from Tamagawa-Gakuen-mae station, in a quiet residential district rather than an instrument quarter.

It was not a guitar workshop at first. For nearly a decade it was a stringed-instrument shop in the broader sense, with violins at its centre, repairs coming in, and the normal business of a neighbourhood maker. The classical guitars — the instruments the Chai name is now known for — only began in 1968, nine years after the doors opened.

That long violin apprenticeship, served on himself, is audible in the guitars. The attention to quartersawn stock, the obsession with how a plate is split rather than merely cut, the reluctance to decorate — these are violin-shop instincts applied to a guitar.

The Workshop in the Film

There is one detail of the Chai story that no other Japanese luthier can claim. When Studio Ghibli made Whisper of the Heart (耳をすませば, 1995), the violin workshop at the heart of the film — the cluttered basement where the boy builds instruments and the girl comes to understand what it means to make something — was modelled on Chai’s shop.

For a generation of Japanese viewers, that room is what a stringed-instrument workshop looks like: timber stacked to the ceiling, tools hung within reach, half-finished bodies in clamps, the light coming in at an angle. The animators did not invent it. They went to Machida and drew what was there.

It is a fitting accident of fame for a maker who otherwise avoided publicity entirely.

Mikan-wari — Splitting the Log Like a Mandarin

The core of Chai’s method, and the thing he is remembered for among people who know how guitars are made, is the way he bought and prepared his wood.

Most workshops buy sawn timber: plates already cut to approximate thickness by a supplier, sorted and graded. Chai bought whole logs and split them himself, radially, from the centre outwards — a method known in Japanese as mikan-wari (みかん割り), “mandarin splitting,” because the log comes apart in wedges like the segments of a mandarin orange.

The reason is grain. A plate cut radially has its growth rings running perpendicular to the face — true quartersawn stock, the stiffest and most dimensionally stable orientation a piece of wood can have. Cut a log into parallel boards instead and only the few planks nearest the centre are properly quartered; the rest run increasingly flat, more prone to cupping, less stiff across the grain. Chai’s method yielded roughly 90 per cent usable quartersawn material.

It is also wasteful, slow, and requires enormous storage. Splitting follows the grain rather than a saw line, so every wedge comes out slightly different and much of each log becomes offcuts. Chai accepted all of it, and held far more timber in the shop than he could ever use in his lifetime — the stacked wood that the Ghibli animators drew was not set dressing.

Chosen, Not Ordered

The timber itself was chosen the same way. Soundboards came from German spruce grown in the Jura mountains at around 1,400 metres — altitude mattering because a slow-growing tree lays down tight, even annual rings.

Neck wood was assigned by model rather than by cost alone: African mahogany on instruments up to the No. 20, Honduran mahogany on the No. 30 and above. Fingerboards in ebony. Backs and sides in rosewood, with Brazilian rosewood on the better instruments of the earlier period — a 1979 No. 30 carries Brazilian rosewood back and sides with a matching bridge and headstock veneer, mahogany neck, ebony board and a lacquer finish over a 650 mm scale.

“It Will Absolutely Never Break”

Chai was not a man who talked his instruments up, with one exception. He claimed, flatly and repeatedly, that his guitars would “absolutely never break” (絶対に壊れない).

Coming from most makers that would be salesmanship. Coming from a man who split his own logs to guarantee the grain orientation of every plate he used, it reads more like a statement about process. A properly quartered, properly seasoned plate is the single best defence a guitar has against the slow structural failures — the sunken top, the lifting bridge, the cracked back — that eventually catch up with instruments built from whatever the timber merchant sent.

Chai guitars from the 1970s turn up today with straight necks and sound structures, which is the only evidence that matters.

Closer to Germany Than to Spain

In style, Chai’s guitars sit nearer the German school than the Spanish. Across the working models there is no decoration for its own sake: a plain, well-cut rosette, modest purfling, nothing added to catch the eye at a distance. The workmanship is meant to be read in the joints, the thicknessing and the finish rather than in ornament.

That restraint earned the instruments an audience well beyond the classical repertoire. Chai guitars were taken up by players who had no interest in being seen with a Spanish-looking guitar and wanted something clean, strong and well made — which is part of why the name is so widely recognised in Japan relative to the workshop’s small size.

The Cheap Ones Were Good Too

The decision that defines the workshop commercially is this: Chai put real effort into the entry-level models.

It is the easiest corner in the trade to cut. A workshop builds its reputation on its top instruments and lets the student models ride on the name, built faster, from lesser stock, to a lower standard. Chai refused that arrangement. The low-numbered models were made with the same timber discipline and the same care as the expensive ones, and they consequently sound and play far better than their price suggested — which is why they are still sought out secondhand decades later.

The model line ran No. 6, 10, 15, 20, 30, 35, 50 and 60, typically at a 650 mm scale with a 51–52 mm nut and Gotoh tuners. Labels were marked fece in Tokyo.

The Range

For a small workshop the catalogue was remarkably broad, and some of it was genuinely unusual:

• Classical guitars — the core of the work, 650 mm scale
• Alto guitars at a 530 mm scale, for ensemble playing
• Bass guitars at 700 mm
• A chembalo guitar — the No. 60, at a 630 mm scale
• A rare 1968 flamenco guitar in all-solid maple at a 660 mm scale, from the first year of guitar production
• Steel-string acoustics and full-acoustic archtops
• Ukuleles, built to the same standard as the guitars

The ukuleles deserve a note of their own. They were described as a classical guitar shrunk down rather than a different instrument — properly fretted, accurate in pitch even above the twelfth fret, which is where cheap ukuleles reliably fall apart. The founder of F’s Ukulele served twelve years at the Chai bench, from 1998 to 2010, building Chai ukuleles by the hundred before going independent.

The Sound

The voice that comes out of all this is consistently described in the same terms: clear and pure, free of muddiness, with a quick attack and an even response across the strings and up the neck.

That is the tonal signature of stiff, well-oriented timber under careful thicknessing — a top that returns energy promptly instead of smearing it, and a structure rigid enough that no single register dominates. It is also exactly what you would expect from a violin maker’s approach to a guitar: the German-school priorities of clarity and balance ahead of the Spanish-school priorities of colour and growl.

Where the Carving Went

The one place Chai allowed himself ornament was the carved work on the upper instruments — and when it appears, it is not restrained at all.

The headstock is cut from solid rosewood and carved in deep relief: a scrolled crest across the top, a central palmette, the slot surrounds bordered with a running rope moulding, and the flat ground between the figures worked over with a punched stipple so the raised ornament lifts away from it. The same hand returns at the bridge, where the wings are carved with a leaf-and-scroll motif over the same stippled ground, well beyond the plain rectangular bridge that most of the catalogue carries.

This is a tradition with a specific home in Japanese lutherie — the deeply carved, stipple-ground headstock associated with the Madrid workshop of Hernández y Aguado, which a number of Japanese makers of Chai’s generation took up and refined. It is slow, unforgiving work: the carving is cut into structural parts of the instrument, so a slip at the headstock slot or the bridge wing is not a cosmetic mistake.

What it tells you about the workshop is that the restraint elsewhere was a choice rather than a limit. Chai was perfectly capable of ornament. He simply reserved it for the instruments that warranted it, and left the rest of the range to be judged on how it was built.

The Second Generation

Chai died in August 2011, aged eighty. His son Yukihiro Chai (茶位幸弘) took over and continues to run the workshop in Machida today.

The method survived the succession. One craftsman builds each guitar from start to finish — no division of labour, no partial assembly passed down a line — which is the only way a workshop of this size can maintain a standard without machinery. The range has narrowed to classical guitars and ukuleles, and at one point orders had to be suspended outright because the backlog had grown beyond what the bench could absorb.

For a shop that started with a student’s homemade violin, a waiting list long enough to close the order book is a reasonable verdict.

The Essentials

1. Born 1931; died August 2011. Entirely self-taught, beginning with a violin he built as a university student
2. Opened the Chai Guitar Workshop in Machida, western Tokyo, in 1959; began building classical guitars in 1968
3. The workshop was the model for the violin workshop in Studio Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart
4. Bought whole logs and split them radially — mikan-wari, “mandarin splitting” — for roughly 90 per cent quartersawn stock
5. German spruce from the Jura mountains at around 1,400 m; African mahogany necks up to the No. 20, Honduran above
6. Claimed his guitars would absolutely never break, and built his timber discipline to back it
7. Restrained, German-school styling across the range, with deeply carved rosewood headstocks and bridges reserved for the upper instruments
8. Deliberate investment in the entry-level models, built to the same timber discipline as the expensive ones
9. Models No. 6 to No. 60, plus altos at 530 mm, basses at 700 mm, a chembalo guitar, acoustics, archtops and ukuleles
10. His son Yukihiro Chai continues the workshop, one craftsman to each instrument

The through-line of Chai’s fifty years at the bench is that he never accepted anyone else’s shortcut, because he had never been taught one. He learned by building a violin alone, so he never inherited the habit of trusting a supplier’s grading. He bought logs and split them himself because that was the only way to be certain. He built the cheap guitars properly because there was no one to tell him that nobody does. It is a method that makes very little commercial sense and produces instruments that are still playing, straight-necked and clear, half a century on.

A profile of the Japanese luthier Yukinobu Chai and the Chai Guitar Workshop in Machida, Tokyo