Kazuo Ichiyanagi

Aichi Prefecture is not where anyone looks for Japanese guitars. The famous workshops are in Tokyo — Kohno, Sakurai, Ida, Kurosawa — and the histories tend to be written as though nothing happened outside the capital. Kazuo Ichiyanagi has spent his entire working life in a small town between Nagoya and the sea, building classical guitars that Japanese players rank alongside the best in the country and that almost never leave it. His top model now sits within reach of a Kohno Maestro in price. Very few people outside Japan have ever played one.

A Workshop in Kanie

Ichiyanagi set up his own shop at the age of twenty-seven and has been making guitars ever since. The workshop is in Kanie, a town in Ama District, Aichi Prefecture, on the flat delta land west of Nagoya — and it has stayed there for the whole of his career.

That geography is part of the story. A maker in Tokyo in the 1970s was surrounded by the trade: dealers, players, rival workshops, the constant traffic of instruments being compared against one another. A maker in Aichi was not. Whatever standard Ichiyanagi arrived at, he arrived at largely on his own terms, and the fact that Japanese dealers came to rank him among the country’s leading luthiers says something about how high that standard was.

The Fernandes Guitars

Before his own label carried any weight, Ichiyanagi built for someone else — and the instruments from that period are among the most interesting he made.

In the 1970s Fernandes, then the leading guitar and equipment company in Japan, commissioned its classical guitars from outside luthiers rather than building them in-house. The GC60 was the top of that range, and it was the only model Fernandes had made by Ichiyanagi personally. The lower grand concert models came from other hands and are built quite differently.

Players who have compared them describe the GC60 as unmistakably built on Kohno’s approach — the bracing has been examined and found to follow it closely — while carrying a character of its own, with volume, balance, clarity and resonance. One owner who set a GC60 beside a 1973 Kohno No. 10 with identical strings found them tonally very similar, with the Ichiyanagi the louder of the two.

These guitars are the best evidence of where he stood before anyone was paying attention. A maker producing instruments that hold their own against a period Kohno, under another company’s name, is not an unknown who got lucky later.

Reading the Model Numbers

Ichiyanagi numbers his models the way many Japanese makers do, and once you know the convention the whole range becomes legible: the model number is the price in units of ten thousand yen.

A No. 15 was a 150,000 yen guitar. A No. 30 was 300,000. The No. 50 and the No. 80 sit at 500,000 and 800,000 yen respectively, the No. 80 being the current top of the range. For comparison, that places the No. 50 between the Kohno Professional J and the Special, and brings the No. 80 within sight of a Kohno Maestro.

The materials follow the same ladder. The No. 50 and No. 80 are built with spruce over Brazilian rosewood; the No. 35 uses spruce over Indian. A No. 30 from 1987 carries a solid spruce top with rosewood back, mahogany neck joining the body at the twelfth fret, ebony fingerboard and nineteen frets, at a 650 mm scale and 52 mm nut. A No. 15 from 1992 keeps the same scale and nut with solid spruce over Indian rosewood.

One thing worth knowing if you are looking at an older instrument: the tops on these guitars are solid, with a spruce reinforcement ring around the soundhole — the same practice Kohno used, and frequently mistaken for a laminated top by people encountering it for the first time. The heavy lacquer on the backs of 1970s examples is also deliberate, applied to prevent cracking.

The Son

The second half of the workshop’s story belongs to Kunihiko Ichiyanagi, born in Aichi in 1964.

He came to the craft from art rather than from music — interested in the visual arts from childhood and a painter before he was a luthier. At twenty-one he entered his father’s workshop, where he had the advantage of both high technical instruction and an unusually deep stock of materials to learn on.

In 1987 he travelled to Spain, and the names he sought out say a good deal about his ambitions: he received advice from Arcángel Fernández and from Barbero hijo — the Madrid tradition at its most authoritative. Two instruments in particular redirected his thinking: a Manuel Ramírez of 1900 and a Romanillos of 1987. He has built by traditional methods ever since.

Later he encountered the German maker Fritz Ober, and concluded that Ober’s thinking pointed toward the same answers arrived at by Hauser, Manuel Ramírez and Romanillos. His own top instrument, the Gran Maestro, is the result of four decades of that accumulated reasoning — built with Brazilian rosewood, Hawaiian koa binding, Cuban cedar necks and carbon tuners, and described as combining a firm core with genuine carrying power.

Two Names, One Bench

What makes this workshop unusual is that the succession never became a handover. Father and son build jointly, and have done for years — Japanese dealers describe the guitars as the work of two generations together, and instruments turn up labelled with both names, such as a Special model from 1999 credited to Kazuo and Kunihiko.

Kunihiko now manages the shop and builds under his own name as well. Kazuo, long past the age at which most makers retire, has continued at the bench rather than stepping away from it.

The arrangement is rare. Most family workshops pass from one generation to the next at a definite moment, and the second generation spends years being measured against the first. Here the two have simply gone on working side by side, which is why an Ichiyanagi guitar of recent decades cannot always be cleanly attributed to one or the other — and why it does not much matter.

The Sound

Japanese dealers describe the workshop’s voice consistently: rich, rounded and warm, with abundant overtones and a beauty that seems to soak into the room rather than being projected at it.

Owners are more specific. A firm core to the note, bright and taut and powerful, yet easy to draw out with a light touch. Long sustain, and balance that holds from the deep resonance of the sixth string through the middle register to the top without breaking anywhere. Excellent intonation. And a neck that can be specified — one owner had the fingerboard radius increased to make barre chords easier, which tells you the workshop still builds to the player rather than to a drawing.

Beyond the Workshop

Ichiyanagi’s influence also runs sideways. The acoustic guitar maker Hiramitsu trained under him before finding his own direction in steel-string instruments, going independent as Hiramitsu Guitars in 1998 and carrying classical construction technique into that very different field.

It is a small detail, but a telling one. A luthier known only for his own output is a craftsman; one whose apprentices go on to found workshops of their own has been running a school without calling it that.

The Essentials

1. Opened his own workshop at the age of twenty-seven and has built in Kanie, Aichi Prefecture, ever since
2. Built the Fernandes GC60 in the 1970s — the only model in that range made by him personally, and closely comparable to a period Kohno
3. Model numbers correspond to price in units of ten thousand yen: the No. 80 is the current top of the range
4. The No. 50 and No. 80 use spruce over Brazilian rosewood; lower models use Indian
5. Tops are solid with a spruce reinforcement ring around the soundhole, following Kohno’s practice
6. His son Kunihiko, born 1964, joined the workshop at twenty-one and studied in Spain in 1987 with Arcángel Fernández and Barbero hijo
7. Father and son build jointly, with instruments issued under both names
8. The acoustic luthier Hiramitsu trained under him before founding Hiramitsu Guitars in 1998

There is a pattern worth noticing in the Japanese workshops that endure: the good ones are almost always two generations deep, and the second generation almost always goes to Spain. Kohno went, and Sakurai followed him. Kurosawa went. Ezaki went. Kunihiko Ichiyanagi went in 1987 and came back having handled a Manuel Ramírez from 1900. What his father built in Aichi without any of that exposure, and what the two of them now build together, is the same tradition arrived at from two directions — and it is still coming out of a small town that almost nobody outside Japan has heard of.

A history of the Japanese luthier Kazuo Ichiyanagi and the Aichi workshop he shares with his son