Masaru Kohno

The Great Father of Guitar Making in Japan (1926–1998)

Guitar historian Ivor Mairants recalled Masaru Kohno in his 1980 memoir My Fifty Fretting Years. Mairants first crossed paths with the maker — then still spelling his name "Kono" — back in 1963, when a shipment of guitars numbered No. 2 through No. 10 arrived at his London shop. Julian Bream happened to stop by that same autumn looking for new instruments, tried out the Kohnos on offer, and walked away with one of the more modestly priced models. According to Mairants, Bream held on to that guitar and kept performing with it for years afterward.

How did a craftsman from Japan end up building guitars in the first place? Mairants traces it back to 1959, when Kohno traveled to Madrid and turned up at the workshop of luthier Arcangel Fernandez on Jesus y Maria street. With a friend translating, he asked simply to observe. Fernandez, an easygoing and open man, agreed, and Kohno began showing up almost daily — often treating his host to lunch or dinner along the way. Through drawings, gestures, and translated conversation, he absorbed Fernandez's methods over roughly six months before returning to Tokyo to open his own shop.

The payoff came in 1967, when Kohno submitted a guitar to the Concours National de Guitares in Liège and took first prize among 31 entrants. Fleta himself, chairing the panel of judges, later told Mairants that the unlabeled instrument reminded him strongly of his own work — high praise from one of Spain's most respected builders. The judging panel that year also included Robert Bouchet, Joaquín Rodrigo, and Alirio Díaz; French luthier Daniel Frédérich took the silver medal (a Frédérich guitar would go on to sell for $60,000 in 2015).

Kohno (far right) in Spain with Segovia, Tansman, and José Tomás, 1960 — at a seminar in Santiago de Compostela. Courtesy of Gendai Magazine.

Breaking the Mold

Writer John Huber, in The Development of the Modern Guitar, described Kohno as already Japan's leading maker by the time he studied under Fleta in Barcelona. Rather than settle for imitating Spanish design once he returned to Tokyo in 1960, Huber says Kohno set out to compete with it directly. He developed his own take on the Torres-style guitar — built with a slimmer neck than Segovia-era instruments typically had, paired with bright trebles and a rich bass response — and the design went on to win the Queen Elizabeth prize for tone. By the late 1960s, demand for Kohno's guitars had outpaced what one workshop could produce, so his nephew Masaki Sakurai helped him scale up into a proper factory that, for the next twenty years, offered players a lower-cost alternative to Ramírez guitars. Sales held strong until a broader slump hit the classical guitar market in the mid-1980s, following three decades of steady growth. Huber also notes a familiar pattern: much as many Madrid luthiers trace their roots to the Ramírez workshop, a number of Tokyo's best independent guitar makers of the 1970s got their start working for Kohno.

A Dealer's Perspective — Bill Baker

Guitar dealer Bill Baker shares his own encounter with the Kohno-Fleta connection. Having played several Fletas over the years, he'd come to recognize their distinctive interior scent. When he opened his first Kohno — a 1971 No. 7 — that same aroma brought the memory rushing back. Struck by how much the tone also resembled a Fleta's, he wrote to Masaki Sakurai, Kohno's nephew and protégé, to ask directly whether his uncle had trained with Fleta. Sakurai confirmed it. While the Fernandez apprenticeship is well documented, Baker notes that much less has been written about the Fleta connection — though the evidence shows up in the guitars themselves: after Kohno's return to Tokyo in 1960, his headstock design shifted noticeably toward Fleta's style.

Baker adds that this stylistic shift was a sharp break from the 1959 headstock, and bore no resemblance at all to Fernandez's designs — reinforcing just how convincing the Fleta likeness at the 1967 Belgium competition really was. He closes by noting that every Kohno he's owned has been concert-quality, and describes his own background: four decades of playing, a guitar performance degree from the University of New Mexico, summers spent studying under Emilio Pujol in Cervera, Spain, and time as an associate professor under Héctor García at UNM.

How the Model Numbers Worked

Kohno's naming system evolved as his business grew. Early on, guitars carried plain numeric codes like 421 or 821 — likely tied to completion dates (421 meaning April 21st). Later he switched to model numbers such as No. 4, No. 5, or No. 10, which corresponded to price in Japanese yen: a No. 30 sold for roughly ¥300,000, a No. 15 for about ¥150,000.

As Japan's inflation climbed through the early 1970s and demand for his instruments grew, the model numbers rose right along with it, eventually reaching a No. 50 and then a No. 80. Around 1982, Kohno moved away from numbers entirely, renaming his lines Maestro, Special, Professional, and Concert. But a higher number never guaranteed better tone — as Julian Bream demonstrated when he picked one of the cheaper models out of a batch at Mairants's shop. The point, in the words of painter Manuel López Cía, is that art is meant to be experienced, not scrutinized for surface flaws — and the same holds for vintage guitars: structural soundness, playability, and tone should guide a buyer's decision far more than cosmetic wear.

Guitars only get better with age — and even more so with regular playing.

Biography — via Dave Tate

Luthier Dave Tate sums up Kohno's standing simply: the most significant guitar maker to come out of Japan, and one of the finest builders anywhere in the world. Born in Mito City, Kohno graduated from the Tokyo College of Arts and Crafts in 1948 with a degree in woodcraft, where his interest in guitar building first took hold. He left for Spain in 1959 to learn the trade firsthand.

His six-month apprenticeship with Arcángel Fernández happened almost entirely without shared language — Kohno mostly sat at the back of the shop, watching quietly and absorbing what he could. It clearly worked: back in Tokyo, he opened his own workshop and quickly earned a following among Japanese players. His international breakthrough came in 1967, when he won the Gold Medal at the Concours International de Guitare in Belgium, judged by a panel that included Fleta, Bouchet, Rodrigo, and Díaz. In the years since, well-known performers including Julian Bream, Oscar Ghiglia, and Sharon Isbin have all played Kohno instruments.

From The Classical Guitar: Complete History — Graham Wade

Author Graham Wade notes that Kohno guitars have been favored by a wide range of concert performers, among them Julian Bream, Vladimir Mikulka, and John Mills. Sharon Isbin's Classical Guitar Vol. II (covering Bach, Britten, and Brouwer) and Martin Myslivecek's Umělecký Portrét Martina Myslivečka (Panton, 1981) were both recorded on Kohno instruments. Wade also points to guitarist Frédéric Zigante, who has performed and recorded the complete guitar works of Villa-Lobos and Paganini on a Kohno guitar, and who taught guitar at the Conservatory of Trieste while touring across Europe, Japan, and China.

A Player's Take — James Bishop-Edwards

Guitarist James Bishop-Edwards offers a more personal comparison. In his view, Kohno's instruments were more comfortable and musical to play than the Ramírez guitars of the '70s and '80s, even though the Ramírez influence shows clearly in string length, neck reinforcement, and other details. He recalls a 1982 Ramírez with a 664mm scale length that left him with serious tendinitis, despite having large, strong hands — and he traces the era's oversized necks back to Segovia's own preference, which shaped a generation of Spanish builders. He learned secondhand that Segovia once explained his switch from Hauser to Ramírez by saying the Hauser neck had simply become too small for him over time. Within that same market context, Bishop-Edwards argues, Kohno still managed to build something more playable than his Spanish counterparts. He adds, half-jokingly, that if Segovia had toured with a Kohno instead back in the 1960s, vintage Kohnos would command Ramírez-level prices today.

Kohno's Place in Guitar History

In A Collection of Fine Spanish Guitars from Torres to the Present, author Sheldon Urlik cites guitar historian Maurice Summerfield's lineage of great builders — running from Torres through Manuel Ramírez, Hauser I, Fleta, Kohno, Rubio, and Romanillos — with Smallman placed at the modern end of that continuum. (Summerfield's own book is The Classical Guitar: Its Evolution, Players, and Personalities Since 1800.) Urlik's book features a 1963 Kohno guitar on page 110, and Summerfield describes Kohno, who died on December 13, 1998, as one of the most significant classical guitar makers of the 20th century.