Toru Fujii

Almost every maker in this series learned their craft from a master at a bench. Toru Fujii learned his on a factory floor, at one of the most respected acoustic guitar makers in Japan, and then did something unusual with it. Working alone in a small workshop in Gifu, he reconstructed his building method around the principles set out by the American luthier Ervin Somogyi — not loosely, but thoroughly, down to the bracing geometry and the construction of the sides. The result is a body of work that looks and sounds like almost nothing else coming out of Japan, made by a luthier most people have never heard of.

Out of the Yairi Workshop

Fujii built his foundation as a craftsman at K. Yairi — the Gifu company founded by Kazuo Yairi, and one of the defining names in Japanese acoustic guitar making.

That is a particular kind of training. Yairi is not a factory in the usual sense: roughly thirty craftsmen produce twenty to twenty-five guitars a day, with machinery kept to a minimum and assembly and finishing done by hand, and the company has held to that method for decades rather than automating. Some of its craftsmen have spent their whole working lives there and have mastered every stage of the build.

A maker who comes out of that environment has something a lone apprentice rarely acquires: the experience of building a great many instruments to a consistent standard, with every process already worked out. What such a maker does not necessarily have is a voice of his own. Finding one is the second half of the job, and it is where Fujii’s story becomes interesting.

TFG Craft, Seki

Fujii now runs the TFG Craft workshop in Seki City, Gifu — a town better known worldwide for blades than for guitars, with a cutlery tradition running back some eight centuries. He builds and repairs there, taking commissions directly, and documents the work on a long-running construction diary.

Gifu Prefecture has quietly become one of the centres of Japanese acoustic guitar making. Yairi is in Kani, a short distance away. Fujii stayed in the region and set up on his own.

The Somogyi School

The decisive influence on Fujii’s mature work is Ervin Somogyi, the American luthier whose two-volume study The Responsive Guitar is among the most serious books ever written about how a steel-string guitar actually functions.

Plenty of makers cite Somogyi. Fujii went considerably further than citation. Observers who have examined his recent instruments describe him as building squarely within the Somogyi school and having adopted the core of the method wholesale — the headstock, the neck, the soundboard, the body, and crucially the internal engineering.

Four features recur:

• Tall, thin soundboard braces — stiffness achieved through height rather than mass, so the top is strong along the brace and free everywhere else
• Doubled sides, laminated from two different materials — a heavier, more rigid rim that reflects energy back into the top instead of absorbing it
• A wide centre strip down the back, reinforcing the join across a broader area
• Mahogany back braces, chosen for their particular stiffness-to-weight behaviour

Taken together these are not decorative choices. They are a coherent argument about where a guitar should be stiff and where it should move — and adopting them means rebuilding one’s method from the inside out rather than adding a flourish to an existing design.

The Model CL

The clearest illustration of what Fujii does is his nylon-string crossover, the Model CL — a guitar that sits deliberately between the classical and steel-string worlds.

The specification reads: solid European spruce top, solid Madagascar rosewood back and sides, mahogany neck, ebony fingerboard, and a Brazilian rosewood bridge given a distinctive scooped carving. The rosette is a separated wood mosaic; the headstock is finely split in a shape no traditional classical maker would produce. Fan bracing supports the top, while the back is lattice-braced — an unusual combination, and visible through the soundhole.

The dimensions are precise: 652 mm scale, 52 mm at the nut, 272 mm across the upper bout and 360 mm across the lower, 483 mm body length, and a body depth tapering from 91 mm at the neck to 98 mm at the tail.

That 52 mm nut is traditional classical width, but the neck profile is shaped to sit in the hand rather than to satisfy convention — players report that it presses easily and feels natural even to someone who normally plays steel strings. The voice is described as clear, bright and well balanced. Pickups are fitted as standard on many examples.

Materials Worth Noting

Fujii’s timber choices are those of a maker who is not building to a catalogue. A 2018 MDC pairs an Adirondack spruce top with Macassar ebony back and doubled sides laminated from Indian rosewood and Macassar ebony, finished in shellac and inlaid with rosewood and padauk mosaic at the soundhole and endpin. Other instruments use European spruce over Madagascar rosewood.

Macassar ebony as a back and side wood is rare, heavy, hard and difficult to work. Adirondack spruce is the timber American makers reserve for their best instruments. Shellac on a steel-string is unusual in itself, being thin, delicate and acoustically superior to modern finishes. None of these choices makes the build easier.

The One-Off Instruments

Fujii’s highest-profile commission came from Kotaro Oshio, the fingerstyle guitarist who is among the most widely known acoustic players in Japan. Fujii built the double-course guitar Oshio has performed on in concert for the piece Hoshizuna.

Double-course instruments — strings paired like a twelve-string, but configured for a particular piece of music — are one-off engineering problems rather than variations on a catalogue model. Every course added changes the load on the top, the spacing at the nut and saddle, and the balance of the whole instrument. A performer of Oshio’s standing commissioning one from a small Gifu workshop is a meaningful endorsement.

That willingness to leave the standard shapes behind runs through the workshop. Fujii is not a maker who settles on a successful model and reproduces it; the guitars carry original body outlines, unconventional headstocks, scooped and carved bridges, and construction decisions arrived at case by case rather than taken from a plan.

It is worth remembering where that confidence comes from. A luthier who has built to a professional standard on a production floor knows exactly which conventions exist for good structural reasons and which are simply habit. That knowledge is what makes genuine experiment possible rather than reckless — and it is why the unusual instruments coming out of Seki still behave like properly engineered guitars.

Fujii has also maintained a close working relationship with the luthier Mitsuhiro Uchida, describing a genuine teacher-and-student connection.

A Note on the Name

Two well-regarded Japanese luthiers share this surname, and dealers confuse them regularly.

Toru Fujii (藤井徹) is the subject of this page: TFG Craft, Seki City in Gifu, ex-K. Yairi, Somogyi-influenced, models MD, MDC and CL.

Keisuke Fujii (藤井圭介) is a different maker entirely — FUJII GUITARS, based in Toyama, who trained for over a decade under Kenji Sugita and went independent in 2012. Both build excellent guitars. They are not the same person, and not related in any workshop sense.

The Essentials

1. Built his foundation as a craftsman at K. Yairi in Gifu, one of the defining Japanese acoustic guitar makers
2. Runs the TFG Craft workshop in Seki City, Gifu, building and repairing to order
3. Rebuilt his method around Ervin Somogyi’s The Responsive Guitar, adopting the school’s core construction rather than borrowing surface features
4. Uses tall thin top bracing, doubled sides laminated from two materials, a wide back centre strip and mahogany back braces
5. The Model CL nylon crossover runs a 652 mm scale and 52 mm nut, fan-braced top with a lattice-braced back
6. Works in unusual timbers — Macassar ebony, Adirondack spruce, Madagascar rosewood — and finishes in shellac
7. Built the double-course guitar played in concert by Kotaro Oshio, alongside original experimental instruments outside any standard pattern
8. Not to be confused with Keisuke Fujii of FUJII GUITARS in Toyama

There is a version of the craft in which tradition is something you inherit and then protect. Fujii represents the other version. He learned a Japanese method thoroughly enough to build to a professional standard, then chose an entirely different lineage — an American one, from a book — and rebuilt his work around it because he found the reasoning more convincing. That takes a particular kind of confidence, and the instruments justify it. They do not look like Japanese guitars, or American ones. They look like his.

A profile of the Japanese luthier Toru Fujii and the TFG Craft workshop in Seki, Gifu