There is a particular kind of difficulty in inheriting a famous workshop. The instruments carry a name the public already trusts, built to standards someone else set, judged against a back catalogue that has had decades to become legendary. Change too much and you have betrayed the tradition; change nothing and you are merely a caretaker. Masaki Sakurai spent thirty-two years learning the Kohno workshop from the inside and twenty-seven running it, and by the time he died in 2025 the guitars bearing the joint name were regarded as no compromise at all — a rare thing in the history of any craft.

An Engineer Who Changed His Mind

Sakurai was born in Tokyo on 10 May 1944, in the closing year of the war, and he did not begin as a craftsman. He took a degree in electrical engineering — a thoroughly sensible choice for a young man in a country rebuilding itself around technology — and then chose not to use it.

In 1966 he went to work at his uncle’s guitar shop in Tokyo instead. The uncle was Masaru Kohno, and by that point Kohno was the most significant guitar maker Japan had produced.

It is worth pausing on what that engineering training may actually have contributed. Sakurai came to the bench already accustomed to thinking in terms of structures, loads and measurable properties, rather than through inherited habit alone. In a workshop whose reputation would come to rest on consistency — on the fourth guitar in a series being as good as the first — that is not an irrelevant background.

The Workshop He Walked Into

Masaru Kohno was born in Mito City in 1926 and graduated from the Tokyo College of Arts and Crafts in 1948 with a degree in woodcraft. In 1960 he travelled to Spain to learn guitar making at its source, apprenticing for around six months in a Madrid workshop where, by all accounts, neither man spoke the other’s language — so Kohno sat at the back and watched, silently and very attentively, for months.

It worked. Back in Tokyo he established his own workshop and was quickly recognised by Japanese guitarists. His international breakthrough came in 1967 at the guitar-making competition in Liège, Belgium, where instruments were judged anonymously with the makers’ labels removed, before a panel including Ignacio Fleta, Robert Bouchet, Joaquín Rodrigo and Alirio Díaz. Kohno took the gold medal for sound. The French luthier Daniel Friederich took the gold for craftsmanship.

Sakurai had joined the workshop the year before. He was twenty-two, and he was present for the moment Japanese lutherie announced itself to the world.

Julian Bream, Oscar Ghiglia and Sharon Isbin were among the players who took up Kohno instruments after Liège. The workshop Sakurai had walked into in 1966 became, within a decade, one of the most respected in the world.

Thirty-Two Years of Apprenticeship

What followed is unusual by modern standards: Sakurai spent more than three decades in the workshop before it became his.

Under Kohno’s mentorship he developed a detailed understanding of classical guitar construction, tonewood selection, and the meticulous techniques the workshop demanded. From 1976 he began producing a line of numbered instruments under his own name — the M. Sakurai models, of which the No. 5 and No. 8 are the ones collectors encounter most often. These were built closely on Kohno designs and constructed under Kohno’s direct supervision, which is exactly what you would expect: a maker being given his own label while the master still had a hand on the work.

That long apprenticeship is the reason the succession worked. By 1998 there was nothing left for Sakurai to learn about how these guitars were built, because he had been building them for thirty-two years.

Paris, 1988

Ten years before he inherited the workshop, Sakurai settled the question of whether he could stand on his own.

In 1988 he won First Prize at the 4th International Guitar Making Competition in Paris. It is worth being precise about what that means: this was not a prize awarded to the Kohno workshop, and not a recognition of his uncle’s designs. It was an international jury placing Sakurai’s own work at the top of a field of the world’s active luthiers, twenty-two years into his career and still officially the assistant.

The parallel with 1967 is hard to miss. Kohno established the workshop’s international reputation by winning a competition in Europe; Sakurai secured his own by doing the same thing twenty-one years later, in another European capital, on his own merits.

1998: Taking the Name

Masaru Kohno died in 1998. Sakurai took over the workshop and continued building under the name Sakurai-Kohno — a decision that says a good deal about the man. He did not erase his uncle’s name, and he did not hide behind it either. Both names went on the label.

What he preserved was the substance: the methods, the materials choices, and the quality benchmarks established over four decades of work. Dealers who handled the instruments through the transition are consistent that the guitars built after 1998 maintained the same quality, precision, attention to detail and beauty of tone that had made the Kohno name what it was.

What he added was his own development of the range. The model line expanded thoughtfully over his years in charge — the Maestro, the Special, the Concert-R, the Professional J and the Concert J — each keeping the workshop’s core identity while reflecting his own evolved sensibility and what contemporary concert players had come to expect. Tradition maintained, and quietly moved forward.

The Guitars

The Sakurai-Kohno instrument is built on Spanish principles brought back from Madrid and then subjected to a standard of consistency that is characteristically Japanese. Careful voicing of the spruce or cedar soundboard, bracing informed by the fan-braced Spanish tradition, and a level of finish that reflects a craft culture built on attention and discipline.

The result is a guitar known for balance and reliability rather than eccentricity. These are not instruments with a dramatic personality that a player must accommodate; they are instruments that do what a concert guitar is supposed to do, evenly, across the whole range, in every example. That reputation for consistency is precisely why the workshop’s guitars are so widely used by professionals and so heavily represented in conservatoires — and it is the hardest reputation in lutherie to earn, because it requires being right every time rather than brilliant occasionally.

Continuity

Sakurai died in July 2025, at the age of eighty-one, having spent fifty-nine years in the same workshop.

The line does not end there. So Kimishima — Masaru Kohno’s grandson — joined the workshop in 2007 and trained under Sakurai for nearly two decades. The knowledge that Kohno brought back from Madrid in 1960 has now passed through two full generations of hands, and remains in Tokyo.

The Record

1. Trained as an electrical engineer before choosing lutherie, joining his uncle Masaru Kohno’s Tokyo workshop in 1966 at the age of twenty-two
2. Arrived one year before Kohno’s gold medal at the blind-judged 1967 Liège competition — the result that established Japanese guitar making internationally
3. Began his own numbered M. Sakurai line in 1976, built on Kohno designs under Kohno’s direct supervision
4. Won First Prize at the 4th International Guitar Making Competition in Paris in 1988, on his own work rather than the workshop’s reputation
5. Took over the workshop on Kohno’s death in 1998, keeping both names on the label as Sakurai-Kohno
6. Preserved the workshop’s methods, materials and quality benchmarks through the succession without any drop in standard
7. Expanded the range with the Maestro, Special, Concert-R, Professional J and Concert J models
8. Trained So Kimishima, Kohno’s grandson, in the workshop from 2007 — carrying the lineage into a third generation

The luthiers who get written about are usually the innovators — the ones who changed the bracing, or the soundboard, or the outline. Sakurai changed none of those things, and that was the point. He was handed something that already worked and spent fifty-nine years making sure it kept working, which is a less glamorous achievement and a considerably rarer one. Most famous workshops decline after the founder dies. This one did not, and the reason is that the man who took it over had already been building its guitars for three decades before anybody asked him to.

A history of the Japanese luthier Masaki Sakurai and the Sakurai-Kohno workshop in Tokyo