Most Japanese luthiers of the postwar generation learned the Spanish guitar second-hand — from imported instruments, from photographs, from measurements taken off a borrowed Torres. A small number went to Spain and learned it at the source. Sumio Kurosawa was one of them, and the experience marked him so deeply that when he began selling guitars under his own name he labelled them Sumio Madrid. Within a decade he was priced alongside Masaru Kohno. His guitars remain among the most sought-after and least written-about instruments of the Japanese golden age.

The Uncle’s Workshop

Kurosawa began learning guitar making in 1958, under his uncle Tsunesaburo Kurosawa. It was a family trade, entered the traditional way — at a relative’s bench, young, and for as long as it took.

Japan in 1958 was an interesting place to start. The classical guitar was gathering momentum, a domestic instrument-making industry was rebuilding itself after the war, and a generation of makers who would become internationally significant were all serving their apprenticeships at roughly the same moment. Masaru Kohno was two years from his own trip to Spain. The workshops that would define Japanese lutherie for the next half century were, in 1958, mostly small rooms with a handful of people in them.

Madrid, 1963

Five years into his training, Kurosawa did the thing that separates his career from most of his contemporaries’: he moved to Spain.

He arrived in 1963 and spent roughly two years studying under Aguado — Victoriano Aguado, of the celebrated Madrid workshop trading as M. Hernández y V. Aguado, one of the most respected houses in the Spanish capital. It is the same workshop where the Yamaha luthier Hideyuki Ezaki would later study under Manuel Hernández, and it sat squarely in the Madrid tradition descending from Manuel Ramírez, Santos Hernández and Domingo Esteso.

Two years is a serious immersion. He was not visiting; he was working in a Spanish shop, in Spanish, learning how those instruments were actually put together — the bracing, the voicing, the proportions, and the accumulated judgement that never makes it onto a plan.

When he came home he did not simply apply what he had learned. He kept the city’s name attached to his work, labelling his instruments Sumio Madrid — an unusual and rather unguarded declaration of where a Japanese maker believed his guitars came from.

Coming Home

Kurosawa returned to Japan around 1965 and began building. The instruments from immediately after his return are the rarest things he made — early guitars, often unnumbered and undated, signed by hand.

One surviving example from about 1965 or 1966 carries a cedar top with solid rosewood back and sides, and something genuinely unusual: a true varnish finish, crystallised with age, of the kind that almost never appears on a guitar of any origin. A luthier who examined it described the instrument as having the warmth, responsiveness and ease of a much older Spanish guitar — the comparison reached for was an original Torres.

He established his own workshop in the early 1970s, and it is from that point that the career properly takes shape.

Reading the Model Numbers

Anyone shopping for a Kurosawa needs to understand one thing, because it causes constant confusion: the model numbers moved over time while the instruments stayed the same.

In the late 1970s he sold under the Sumio Madrid name, hand-signed, in three grades: models 10, 15 and 20. The 20 was the top of the line.

By 1982, a guitar of that same specification and class was labelled model 30. By the mid-1990s, the equivalent instrument was a model 50.

So a 1978 model 20, a 1982 model 30 and a 1996 model 50 are broadly the same tier of guitar. The number inflated; the instrument did not change grade. Judging two Kurosawas against each other by their model numbers alone, without checking the year, will mislead you badly — and it is the single most useful thing to know when buying one.

For scale, by 2010 the equivalent signature model was priced at 800,000 yen.

Among the Elite

The Sumio Madrid instruments established him. He became one of the most highly regarded luthiers in Japan, and by the early 1990s was counted among the permanent elite of Japanese guitar making.

The clearest measure of that standing is commercial rather than critical. He was able to price his guitars at the same level as the most prominent Japanese makers of the era — Masaru Kohno, Sakazo Nakade, Toshihiko Nakade, and Yamaha’s Hideyuki Ezaki. In a market as knowledgeable and as unsentimental as Japan’s, buyers do not pay Kohno prices for a lesser instrument.

The Instruments

Kurosawa built in the Madrid manner: Spanish construction, traditional fan bracing, and a preference for materials that reward careful voicing rather than concealing careless work.

The top instruments used Brazilian rosewood for back and sides — the 1978 model 20 among them — with spruce or cedar soundboards. Later guitars from the workshop are built with tonewoods that had been seasoning for fifty years or more, a stock accumulated over decades of working life.

The voice is described consistently: warm, with good volume, clarity and balance, rich basses and sweet trebles, and a responsiveness that makes the instrument easy to play well. That last quality comes up repeatedly, and it is the Madrid inheritance showing — the Spanish tradition has always prized an instrument that meets the player halfway.

The Workshop Today

Sumio Kurosawa no longer builds. His son, Tetsuo Kurosawa, now heads the Kurosawa workshop and continues the tradition, and his instruments command prices in the same bracket his father’s reached.

A new guitar of that class from the workshop today — built with fifty-year-old woods and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, by a leading Japanese luthier — sits at a level that still undercuts comparable Spanish instruments, which is roughly where Japanese lutherie has sat in the market for half a century: equal in quality, cheaper by reputation alone.

The Essentials

1. Began learning guitar making in 1958 under his uncle, Tsunesaburo Kurosawa
2. Moved to Spain in 1963 and studied for around two years under Aguado, of the Madrid workshop M. Hernández y V. Aguado
3. Returned to Japan around 1965; his earliest instruments are hand-signed, often undated, and occasionally finished in true varnish
4. Established his own workshop in the early 1970s
5. Sold under the name Sumio Madrid in the late 1970s, hand-signed, in models 10, 15 and 20
6. Model numbers inflated over time — the same class of guitar became a 30 by 1982 and a 50 by the mid-1990s
7. Priced alongside Kohno, Sakazo and Toshihiko Nakade, and Ezaki; counted among the Japanese luthier elite by the early 1990s
8. The workshop continues under his son, Tetsuo Kurosawa

There is a pattern in the best Japanese guitars of this period, and Kurosawa is one of its clearest cases. The makers who mattered did not copy Spanish instruments; they went and learned how to build them, from Spaniards, in Spain, and then brought that knowledge home to a craft culture that happened to be unusually good at precision and consistency. Kohno did it. Ezaki did it. Kurosawa did it, and then spent thirty years telling anyone who opened his guitars exactly where he had been.

A history of the Japanese luthier Sumio Kurosawa, his Madrid training, and the Sumio Madrid guitars