Some luthiers build a reputation on their own name. Wataru Tsuji built one on a workshop's. For more than forty years he has led Asturias, the Kyushu guitar house whose instruments are treated in Japan as a domestic standard and which remain, for that very reason, unusually difficult to find anywhere else. His personal label — the S-series — represents the top of what that workshop produces, and it has quietly become one of the most respected signatures in Japanese lutherie.

A Word About Japanese Guitars

Before anything else, a misconception worth clearing away. Japanese classical guitars are frequently dismissed as factory instruments, a phrase that conjures assembly lines and interchangeable output. The reality is close to the opposite. Most were produced in small workshops by small crews of artisans working under the supervision of a master luthier — which is, of course, exactly how the great Spanish workshops have always operated.

Asturias is a case in point. The workshop is a small operation in Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu, employing somewhere between fifteen and seventeen people — many of whom have spent most of their working lives there, or arrived through a family connection. That is not a factory. That is a Spanish-style atelier that happens to be in Japan.

Asturias: Kyushu, 1962

Instruments have been built under the Asturias name on Kyushu since 1962. The house was founded by the luthier Masaru Matano, working from a workshop in Kurume, and it built a strong reputation across the 1960s and 1970s.

Matano worked as most serious makers do, with a team of skilled associates around him — among them Tatsuo Tanaka, and later Hiroumi Yamaguchi and Eichi Kodaira, both of whom would go on to matter in their own right.

In 1980 the Rokkomann company took over Matano's Kurume workshop, an event usually described as the birth of the "new" Asturias. What happened next is genuinely murky: Matano disappeared from the picture in 1981, and the circumstances have never been satisfactorily documented. It is one of the small unsolved stories of postwar Japanese lutherie.

1981: Tsuji Takes the Workshop

From 1981 onward, Wataru Tsuji has led Asturias. The same year, the workshop introduced a serial number system on its labels — a small administrative change that turns out to be enormously useful, because it makes instruments from the Tsuji era precisely datable in a way the earlier ones are not.

He inherited a house with an established design language and a team of experienced makers, and his role since has been that of chief luthier: setting the standard, supervising construction, and personally building the instruments at the top of the range. Guitars carrying his own label were historically both signed and stamped — a practice since simplified to one or the other.

The S-Series

Tsuji's personal line is an in-house label within the Asturias brand, running S-1, S-1S, S-2 and S-3 in ascending order. These are the guitars he is known for internationally, and dealers who handle them are consistent on one point: the fit and finish is essentially flawless, and the materials are of a high grade throughout.

The construction is Hauser-influenced rather than a strict copy of any single Spanish or German model — a design descended from the Torres tradition by way of the German school, then interpreted through Japanese standards of precision. The specification is consistent across the range: solid spruce or Canadian cedar for the soundboard, Indian rosewood back and sides, 650 mm scale length, 52 mm at the nut widening to 63 mm at the twelfth fret, and a lacquer finish.

The workshop's reputation does not rest on marketing. Asturias instruments performed strongly in the Guitar Foundation of America's blind evaluations for sound quality and playability — tested without the makers' names attached.

That blind-test result is worth dwelling on, because it removes the variable that most distorts judgements about Japanese instruments. Assessed purely on how they sound and play, with no label to prejudice the listener, they held their own against anything.

The Company They Keep

Two further details indicate how the workshop is regarded by people whose opinion is difficult to buy.

Asturias has built instruments for Richard Bruné, the American luthier and scholar whose own guitars are among the most sought-after in the world and who is not in the habit of putting his name near work he does not respect. And the British guitarist John Mills has owned and performed extensively on Asturias instruments — a working concert player's endorsement, which is the only kind that really counts.

Rarely Seen Outside Japan

If you have not encountered a Tsuji guitar, there is a straightforward reason. Domestic demand in Japan is high enough that these instruments rarely leave the country, and they surface on the international used market only occasionally.

That scarcity is not artificial. It is the consequence of a small workshop with a devoted home following and no particular need to export. Asturias was distributed in the United States for a period through a Nashville importer, but that arrangement lapsed, and there has been no consistent American distribution since — which is why the brand is far better known among Japanese players than among Western ones, despite the quality being entirely comparable.

The Sound

Players describe these guitars in the terms that recur across the best Japanese work: clarity, precision, evenness across the registers, and a fit and finish that is close to faultless. The concert models are noted for volume and sustain with a wide dynamic range and a genuine balance between trebles and basses — not a bright guitar or a dark one, but an even one.

The Hauser lineage is audible in the character: focused, articulate, and controlled rather than loose and romantic. These are instruments built for players who want to hear exactly what they are doing.

Why Tsuji Matters

• Has led the Asturias workshop on Kyushu since 1981, following the house's founding by Masaru Matano in 1962
• Chief luthier of a genuine atelier — roughly fifteen to seventeen makers, many with lifelong or family ties to the workshop
• Introduced serial numbering on Asturias labels in 1981, making instruments of his era precisely datable
• Builds the S-series under his own in-house label: S-1, S-1S, S-2 and S-3
• Hauser-influenced construction rather than direct copying, in spruce or cedar with Indian rosewood, 650 mm scale and 52 mm nut
• Asturias instruments rated highly in Guitar Foundation of America blind tests for sound and playability
• The workshop has built for the luthier Richard Bruné, and John Mills has performed extensively on Asturias guitars
• Rarely exported, owing to strong domestic demand — genuinely uncommon on the international market

There is a kind of maker whose significance is easy to miss because it is distributed rather than concentrated. Tsuji has spent four decades ensuring that every guitar leaving a Kyushu workshop meets a standard, which means his real output is not the S-series alone but the thousands of Asturias instruments built under his supervision and carrying his judgement inside them. The luthiers whose names get remembered are usually the ones who worked alone. The ones who raise the level of everything around them are harder to see — and often matter more.

A history of the Japanese luthier Wataru Tsuji and the Asturias workshop he has led since 1981