There is a reason Hideo Ida’s guitars are so rarely seen outside Japan, and it is not obscurity. He builds only on commission, one instrument at a time, and the people who commission them do not sell them. For more than fifty years he has worked to the same principle: that if a guitar is to answer a particular player’s wishes, then one pair of hands must carry it from the choice of timber through to the final coat of finish. The result is a body of work in which almost no two instruments are identical — and a maker whose name commands respect among Japanese guitarists out of all proportion to his visibility abroad.

A Guitar Measured in 1929

To understand where Ida comes from, it is worth going back three generations before him — to a violin maker and an afternoon in Tokyo.

In 1929 Andrés Segovia performed in Japan. The Japanese master violin luthier Kinpachi Miyamoto was given the chance to examine Segovia’s concert guitar, and he measured it. Miyamoto himself never moved into guitar making. But in the 1930s he took on two apprentices, the brothers Sakazo and Rokutaro Nakade, and they did.

In the mid-1950s the Nakade brothers became the first Japanese luthiers to travel to Spain to study traditional guitar making at its source. Practically every significant Japanese maker of the following generation would eventually follow that path — Kohno, Kurosawa, Ezaki among them — but the Nakades went first.

Sakazo Nakade’s own life had taken a detour along the way. In 1942, in poor health, he gave up the violin trade altogether and went home to farm. In 1950, with the guitar beginning to find a real audience in Japan, his family persuaded him back to Tokyo and to the bench. He was then in his mid-forties. He would build guitars for the next four decades.

The Nakade Workshop

This is the workshop Hideo Ida walked into.

Sakazo Nakade (1906–1993) is routinely described as the father of modern Japanese lutherie, and his standing rests on two things. The first is the guitars: he built at a rate of roughly thirty a year, and through the early 1960s — before Masaru Kohno became internationally famous later in that decade — the Nakade brothers were the most highly regarded makers in Japan, selling at the same price level Kohno would later command.

The second is teaching. Over his lifetime Nakade took on more than thirty apprentices, alongside training his own sons Teruaki, Toshihiko and Yukio, all of whom became luthiers in their own right. When lists are made of the makers who came out of that workshop, Hideo Ida’s name appears among them.

Ida worked there through the 1960s and into the early 1970s before opening a shop of his own. That is a long apprenticeship by any measure, and it shows in the instruments: the guitars he was building within a few years of going independent were already being priced against the best in Japan.

Standing on His Own

The clearest measure of where Ida stood by the mid-1970s is commercial. A C-15 from 1974 sold for 150,000 yen — placing it directly alongside the Masaru Kohno model 15, the benchmark instrument of the era. He was, within a few years of leaving Nakade’s bench, being valued at the same level as the most celebrated maker in the country.

The specification of that guitar explains why: a solid spruce top over solid Brazilian rosewood back and sides, bone nut and saddle, 52 mm at the nut and a 654 mm scale. A top model from 1976 runs a 650 mm scale with a 51 mm nut, using the best woods he could obtain and inlay work to match. A C-20 from 1975 or 1976 is essentially the same instrument as the earlier C-15 — same woods, same construction — which is a useful thing to know when comparing them on the second-hand market.

Every Headstock Different

In the 1970s Ida made each guitar a genuinely unique object, with a custom headstock carving as well as a custom rosette. No two left the workshop looking the same.

The headstocks from that period are carved in the manner of the Madrid workshop of Hernández y Aguado — a nod to the Spanish house whose instruments set the standard in that decade, and whose influence runs through Japanese lutherie of the period more widely. It is worth being clear that this is a design lineage rather than a training one: Ida learned his craft at Nakade’s bench in Tokyo, and took the carving idiom from the Spanish instruments he admired.

The Bull and the Bullfighter

Most luthiers sign their work with a label. Ida signs his with a rosette.

The decorative ring around the soundhole of an Ida guitar carries a bull and a bullfighter — a Spanish motif he has used on most of his instruments and which appears on no other maker’s work. It is the kind of detail that makes an instrument identifiable across a room, and it tells you something about the man: a Japanese craftsman who chose, as his personal emblem, the most unmistakably Spanish image available to him.

Ramírez Bracing, Adapted

Inside, the guitars of this period follow the Ramírez 1A pattern — the bracing scheme of the Madrid workshop that dominated concert playing through the 1960s and 1970s — with one deliberate change. Where the original carries a diagonal bar running past the soundhole, Ida extends his only as far as the soundhole and no further.

It is a small alteration and a telling one. Japanese luthiers of the period frequently modified the Ramírez design in exactly this way rather than copying it outright. They had studied the Spanish instruments closely enough to understand what each component did, and were confident enough to change the ones they judged could be improved. It is the difference between imitation and inheritance.

What the Players Said

By the early 1980s Ida’s instruments were being handed to the most significant guitarists alive, and his workshop recorded what they said.

Andrés Segovia’s reaction, in July 1982, was simply “very nice.” The Spanish guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza responded with open admiration in the spring of 1981. José Tomás called it a charming instrument in July 1981, and José Luis González judged it a very good one in October 1980.

Four of the most authoritative Spanish and international players of the era, across three years, all reaching the same verdict about guitars made in a small Tokyo workshop. That is the recognition that established him.

One Pair of Hands

Ida has stated his working philosophy plainly. His motto, as he puts it, comes down to a single question: how far can the work meet the satisfaction of the person who commissioned it?

His answer is that reflecting a customer’s wishes into every corner of an instrument only means something if he personally carries out all of it — the selection of materials, the construction, the carving and the finishing. Not supervised. Done.

That is why the workshop has never scaled. Building to order, by one person, at concert standard, imposes a hard ceiling on output — and it is the reason his guitars so rarely reach the second-hand market. He has also been explicit that he does not regard the craft as having an end point, and that he intends to keep pursuing the technique and raising the completeness of the instrument. Current prices from the workshop run from roughly 350,000 to 1,200,000 yen.

Beyond the Classical Guitar

Here the workshop becomes genuinely unusual. Most luthiers of Ida’s standing settle into the six-string concert guitar and stay there — the form is demanding enough to occupy a lifetime, and the market rewards consistency. Ida went the other way. Because he builds only on commission, and because he has never turned down a difficult request, the catalogue has accumulated instruments that exist almost nowhere else.

There are ensemble guitars covering soprano, alto and contrabass registers, built around what he considers a defining quality of the workshop — real volume — so that each part holds its own presence within a guitar orchestra rather than disappearing into the texture. Professional players and amateur guitar circles both use them.

There are requinto guitars, Latin and flamenco models, and nylon-strung jazz guitars. There is a small, easy-playing light guitar of his own design, developed for players who find a full-size instrument physically uncomfortable, with the scale length and proportions worked out to suit the individual. And there are maple guitars, including bird’s-eye maple — a wood almost no classical maker will touch, and one that has to be understood before it can be made to sound like anything at all.

The Eight-String

The multi-string instruments are the clearest demonstration of what he is willing to take on. Ida builds seven, eight, ten and eleven string guitars, and each additional course is a structural problem rather than a decorative one.

Adding strings is not a matter of drilling more holes in the headstock. The fingerboard has to widen, which changes everything about how the left hand meets the neck. The neck profile has to remain comfortable under a hand now reaching considerably further, without becoming so thick that it fights the player. The extra courses add tension the top was never designed to carry, so the bracing has to be reconsidered — strong enough to hold, light enough not to choke the soundboard. And the additional bass strings need to speak with the same clarity as the treble, which is the hardest part.

The Special eight-string shows how he answers all of that in one instrument. The headstock is enlarged and reshaped to carry the extra machines while keeping the string pull even across the nut; the fingerboard widens to space eight courses without crowding them; the body is proportioned to support the added tension.

Seen close, the point is obvious: this is not a six-string guitar with additions bolted on. It is an instrument designed from the neck outward for the number of strings it carries.

The Unusual Commissions

Beyond even the multi-string work sit the instruments Ida describes simply as special guitars — completely original pieces realised from a customer’s own idea. Body shape, neck shape, materials, internal structure, carving and decoration are all determined by the person commissioning it, and Ida builds whatever the conversation arrives at.

Some of these, he notes, cannot be shown publicly because patent applications are pending — an unusual sentence to find on a classical guitar maker’s website, and a revealing one. Patents are not filed over decoration. Whatever those instruments are, they involve something structurally new, and there are more of them than his published photographs show.

The bird’s-eye maple guitars give a sense of how the process works in practice. One customer found the wood option on Ida’s site, telephoned to ask whether bird’s-eye was genuinely available, specified it directly with him, ordered in the spring of 2023 and took delivery that December. The owner describes the resulting sound not as light, as the pale figured wood might suggest, but as enveloping and mellow — which is the sort of result that only comes from a maker who has worked out what an unusual timber actually wants to do.

Still Working

The Ida Guitar Workshop is in Nishi-Tokyo, and it is still taking commissions, five decades on. Orders are placed directly with the maker, by telephone or email, and the specification is settled in conversation with him rather than through a dealer or a catalogue.

That is how the workshop has always operated, and it explains the scarcity better than any other single fact. Every Ida guitar in existence was made because a particular person asked for a particular instrument, and was made by the man they asked.

The Essentials

1. Trained in the workshop of Sakazo Nakade (1906–1993), the father of modern Japanese lutherie, who took more than thirty apprentices in his lifetime
2. That lineage runs back through Nakade’s own master, the violin maker Kinpachi Miyamoto, who measured Segovia’s guitar in Tokyo in 1929
3. Worked at Nakade’s bench through the 1960s and into the early 1970s before opening his own workshop
4. His 1974 C-15 sold for 150,000 yen — the same level as the Masaru Kohno model 15
5. Builds on the Ramírez 1A bracing pattern, modified so the diagonal bar stops at the soundhole
6. Signs his instruments with a bull-and-bullfighter rosette used by no other maker, and carved 1970s headstocks in the Hernández y Aguado manner
7. Praised by Andrés Segovia, Regino Sainz de la Maza, José Tomás and José Luis González between 1980 and 1982
8. Personally performs every stage himself — material selection, construction, carving and finishing
9. Builds classical, flamenco, Latin, requinto and nylon jazz guitars, 7- to 11-string instruments, soprano, alto and contrabass ensemble guitars, and bespoke commissions

The Japanese makers who became famous abroad mostly did so by winning something in Europe, or by supplying a player whose name travelled. Ida did neither. He built for the people in front of him, one commission at a time, and let the instruments accumulate a reputation among the guitarists who actually owned them. Half a century later the guitars still almost never come up for sale — which is, in its own quiet way, the most convincing review a luthier can receive.

A history of the Japanese luthier Hideo Ida and the Nishi-Tokyo workshop where he still builds to order