Japanese Guitars: Fender Japan, Fujigen and the Matsumoto Sound

In March 1982 a guitar company from California did something its rivals had not expected. It stopped fighting the Japanese copies of its own instruments and asked a Japanese factory to make the real thing. The result was Fender Japan, born in an orchard valley in Nagano, and the first guitars it shipped carried a serial number that began with two letters, JV, for Japanese Vintage. Our argument is simple and a little provocative: the made-in-Japan electric guitar was never a copy in spirit, even when it was a copy in shape. It was a second school of the same craft, and for eight months in 1985 it was the only school still open. This page is the guitar wing of our collector guides, where every family on our shelves has its own map.

Fender Japan ST62-65 Stratocaster from 1982 with a JV serial, sunburst, full front view — A 1982 Fender Japan ST62-65 Stratocaster with a JV serial, from the first year of Japanese production.

At a glance
	The Japanese electric guitar
The spark	The Ventures in Japan, and the electric-guitar boom of the mid-1960s
The factory valley	Matsumoto and Chino, Nagano; Hamamatsu, Shizuoka; Nagoya, Aichi
The turning point	Fender Japan, Ltd., founded March 1982
The serial marks	JV and SQ (1982 to 1984), then one letter and six digits
The two decals	Made in Japan and Crafted in Japan
The new era	Fender Music K.K. from 1 April 2015; the Made in Japan Traditional series from 2017
On our shelves	Japanese and American Fenders, Ibanez, ESP, Gibson, and Japanese hi-fi

A boom with a whammy bar

Japan fell for the electric guitar through one American band. The Ventures played instrumentals: no singer, just a lead guitar ringing over a hard surf beat. They remain the most popular American rock group in Japan, where they have toured from the 1960s to the present. One often-quoted claim is that the Ventures outsold the Beatles two to one in Japan, and an American trade paper reported in January 1966 that the band held five of the top ten Japanese singles of 1965.

The tour of January 1965 is the one most accounts remember. Takeshi Terauchi and his band, the Blue Jeans, opened shows in Tokyo and Yokohama. Terauchi, born in Tsuchiura in 1939, had grown up in an electrical-goods shop; one story says he built his first electric stringed instrument himself. He played Ventures-style instrumentals with more flash, worked the whammy bar like a second voice, and set Japanese folk songs to an electric beat. He played professionally from 1960 until his death in 2021, and Japanese accounts call him the pioneer of the electric guitar in Japan.

The craze had a name: the eleki boom, after the Japanese shortening of "electric". Thousands of young men bought guitars and taught themselves to play, and their elders worried that the noise would ruin their schoolwork. The boom fed straight into the Group Sounds bands of the late 1960s. It also fed the factories. Someone had to build all those guitars, and the someone was in Nagano.

The cowshed in Matsumoto

In May 1960 two men founded an instrument company in Matsumoto, a castle town in the mountains of Nagano. Yutaka Mimura and Yuichiro Yokouchi named it after Mount Fuji, as a promise that it would be the best in Japan. Yokouchi was a dairy-farming adviser, and the company story says he sold three of his own cows to raise the money. The first workshop was a converted cowshed, where ten craftsmen began by making violins.

Violins gave way to classical guitars within a year, and a new factory went up in 1961. In October 1962 the company built its first electric guitars. In 1964 Yokouchi travelled alone to the United States to look for customers, a year before the Ventures tour lit the boom at home. The NAMM oral-history archive records that he attended his first NAMM Show in Chicago in 1965, and that at the height of the Beatle boom his factory made more than 15,000 guitars a month.

The decision that shaped the next fifty years came in 1970. Yokouchi, president from 1969, chose not to export under the factory's own name. Instead the factory would build for other brands, the arrangement the trade calls OEM. That choice made the factory invisible and indispensable at once. By the company's own account it was the first guitar maker in the world to use computer-controlled routers, in 1981, and by 1983 it was making 14,000 guitars a month. Yokouchi died on 2 April 2026, aged 98.

The lawsuit years

By the mid-1970s the Japanese factories could build an American shape as well as the Americans could, and often better. Collectors call the period from about the mid-1970s to the early 1980s the lawsuit era. The phrase is loose. It covers high-quality Japanese guitars that copied the shapes, headstocks and sometimes the logos of Gibson and Fender, and it takes its name from one case in particular.

On 28 June 1977, in the federal court in Philadelphia, the parent company of Gibson filed suit against the American distributor of Ibanez guitars over the use of Gibson's headstock design and logo. Ibanez settled out of court in early 1978, and the case was closed on 2 February 1978. The case was about a headstock, but it marked a whole decade.

The copies themselves were remarkable. Tokai, founded in Hamamatsu in 1947 to make harmonicas and pianos, introduced its Springy Sound Stratocaster replicas in 1977. Greco, a brand of the distributor Kanda Shokai built at Fujigen, made some of the most popular Gibson- and Fender-style guitars of the decade. Fernandes made Fender-style guitars and used a second name, Burny, for its Gibson shapes. Ibanez, meanwhile, had begun its own original Artist models in 1974, and after the case it moved its effort into original designs. In our reading, the lawsuit did not end the Japanese guitar. It pushed the best Japanese makers toward their own shapes and toward the licence that came next.

The Japanese houses of the copy decade
House	Home	Began	What it was known for
Fujigen	Matsumoto, Nagano	1960, violins	Builder for other brands; first Fender Japan factory
Tokai	Hamamatsu, Shizuoka	1947, harmonicas and pianos	Springy Sound Stratocaster replicas from 1977
Greco	A Kanda Shokai brand, built at Fujigen among others	1970s copies	Gibson- and Fender-style models; Fender shapes ended in 1982
Fernandes	Saitama today	1969	Fender-style guitars; Burny for Gibson shapes
Ibanez	Nagoya, Aichi	1908, instrument sales	Original Artist models from 1974
ESP	Jingumae, Tokyo	February 1975, repair shop	Custom work and replacement parts, then its own guitars

1982: Fender comes to Japan

At the start of the 1980s Fender was in trouble. It belonged to the broadcaster CBS, its American guitars cost more than the Japanese ones, and the Japanese copies were winning in Japan itself. In 1981 CBS brought in a new team from the American instruments division of Yamaha. John McLaren took charge of CBS Musical Instruments, Bill Schultz became president of the Fender division, and Dan Smith became director of marketing for electric guitars.

The new team knew Japan. Their answer was to make genuine Fenders there and sell them in Japan at prices that could meet the copies on their own ground. In March 1982 Fender Japan, Ltd. was founded as a joint venture between Fender and two Japanese distributors, Kanda Shokai and Yamano Gakki, with the Fujigen factory as a major partner. Yamano had distributed Fender in Japan since 1963. Kanda Shokai owned the Greco brand, and one condition of the deal was that Greco stop making its Fender copies.

For a while the contract looked set to go to Tokai. Fender chose Fujigen instead, and Smith later called it one of the best factories in the world at the time. He stayed at the factory for about two weeks, deciding the models, sanding necks with the workers and agreeing the details. The first guitars were vintage-style Stratocasters and Telecasters, and their serial numbers began JV. A sister line under the old Squier name went to Europe from 1982, with the same craftsmanship and a different logo. Fender had bought the V.C. Squier string company in 1965; the name now came back to life on a Japanese headstock.

The guitar at the top of this page is one of those first-year instruments: the Fender Japan ST62-65 Stratocaster from 1982, with its JV serial. Look closer: the model code tells the story. ST is the Stratocaster body, and 62 is the year it recreates.

"Fender's renewed partnership with FujiGen, combined with great consumer interest in early Japanese-made Fenders, was the inspiration for the JV Modified guitars."

Allen Abbassi, Fender, on the JV Modified series

Forty years on, Fender itself is mining that first year. The quote above comes from its own product team, on the series that brought the JV name back. The Japanese guitars of 1982 have become a reference point for the company that commissioned them.

Eight months of Japanese Fenders

In January 1982, the same season Fender Japan was being formed, Fender announced reissues of its 1957 and 1962 Stratocasters, built at the old Fullerton plant in California. The idea was the same on both sides of the Pacific: give players the vintage guitar they wanted, new. Then the ground moved. On 1 February 1985, at the winter NAMM convention, Bill Schultz announced that a group of Fender employees and investors would buy the company from CBS. The purchase was formalised on 12 March 1985, and the company took its present name, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.

The buyout did not include the Fullerton factory. The new owners found a smaller plant in Corona, which was not ready until October 1985. For about eight months Fender made no guitars in the United States at all. It sold its American stock and guitars made in Japan. For one season, Japan was the only place in the world making new Fender guitars.

When Corona opened, it could make only seven to ten guitars a day, and all of them were vintage reissue Stratocasters. The first two were Fiesta Red. The American Vintage 62 Stratocaster from 1988, an early Corona guitar in a tweed case, belongs to that rebuilding: in our reading, it is the American answer to the Japanese guitars that had held the line.

Two decals on one neck heel

Turn a Japanese Fender over and look at the neck heel, or at the headstock. One small decal tells you which era it comes from. The first guitars, built at Fujigen, carried a decal reading Made in Japan. In the mid-1990s production passed to Dyna Gakki, a factory in Chino, Nagano, which had built Greco guitars and had already worked as a subcontractor on the first JV instruments. Guitars from the new era carried a different decal: Crafted in Japan.

Collectors call the two eras MIJ and CIJ, and they argue about which is better. In our view, the decal tracks the factory and the period, not a fixed grade of quality. Both factories built to Fender's specifications; both made fine guitars and ordinary ones. After 2007 the decal changed back to Made in Japan, and for a year or two both decals appeared on new guitars.

The decals and what they usually mean
Decal	Usual period	Usual factory	On our shelf
Made in Japan	1982 to the mid-1990s	Fujigen, Matsumoto	JV Stratocaster, 1982; Mustang, 1994-95
Crafted in Japan	Mid-1990s to 2007-08	Dyna Gakki, Chino	Richie Kotzen Telecaster, 2002-04; Jazzmaster, 2006-08
Made in Japan (again)	2007-08 onward	Dyna Gakki and others	Later Japanese signature models

The Fender Japan Mustang MG66-66 in Daphne Blue, made at Fujigen in 1994-95 sits at the close of the first era. It is a short-scale guitar with a pearl pickguard, and a clear example of what a Fujigen finish looks like after thirty years.

See also: Japanese denim, from Kojima to the Osaka Five, another craft that rebuilt an American original.

Reading the neck plate

Japanese Fender serial numbers can date a guitar to within a year or two, with care. For the first two years Fender used two-letter prefixes: JV for Japanese Vintage on the Fender-logo guitars, and SQ on the Squier models. From 1984 it moved to a single letter and five or six digits, closer to the American system. The letters do not run in a neat line, and some were reused, so a serial is a clue to be read with the decal, the parts and the finish.

Common Japanese Fender serial prefixes (Made in Japan decal)
Prefix	Usual years	Notes
JV + 5 digits	1982 to 1984	Japanese Vintage; the first Fujigen guitars
SQ + 5 digits	1983 to 1984	Squier models
E + 6 digits	1984 to 1987	The first single-letter series
A, B or C + 6 digits	1985 to 1986	A and S were reused later; check the decal
F to M + 6 digits	1986 to 1993	Roughly one letter per year
N to V + 5 or 6 digits	1993 to 1997	Letters overlap; read with the decal
T or U + 6 digits	2007 to 2011	Made in Japan decal returns

Our guitars, basses and hi-fi shelf gives the serial, decal and factory wherever we can confirm them. Where two clues disagree, we say so on the piece rather than pick the kinder date.

Signature guitars and Japan's own catalogue

The Japanese catalogue soon stopped being a copy of the American one. From the mid-1990s Fender Japan released its own artist models, many sold only in Japan. The first Yngwie Malmsteen Stratocasters, four of them, came in 1994, and by 1997 there were six. The 1996 catalogue added models for Richie Sambora, Richie Kotzen and Nokie Edwards of the Ventures, and a Ventures model honouring the band that had started it all.

The Jagstang, a Mustang and Jaguar hybrid that was the brainchild of Kurt Cobain, appears in the same catalogue. For a collector this is the real interest of Japanese Fender: guitars that exist only because the Japanese market asked for them.

The Fender Japan Richie Kotzen Telecaster TLR-RK, 2002-04, in brown sunburst with gold hardware is one of those Japan-born signatures, from the Crafted in Japan years. Fender has made both signatures in Japan again in recent years: our shelf has held a Japanese Yngwie Malmsteen Stratocaster from 2018 and a Japanese Richie Kotzen Stratocaster from 2024.

See also: Tokyo's rock-print labels, the clothes worn in front of these amplifiers.

After 2015: a new house in Tokyo

The joint venture lasted thirty-three years. On 31 March 2015 Fender's arrangements with Kanda Shokai and Yamano Gakki ended, and on 1 April 2015 Fender opened its own Japanese company, Fender Music K.K. A Japanese business report from April 2015 dates Kanda Shokai's licence for the Fender Japan brand from 1997, which suggests the venture itself was reorganised at least once along the way.

The new company sold its Japanese guitars as the Japan Exclusive series at first. On 14 September 2017, the thirty-fifth anniversary of Japanese Fender, it announced the Made in Japan Traditional series, with a pop-up Fender Cafe in Shibuya and an exhibition called My First Fender, in which thirteen working musicians showed the Japanese Fenders of their youth. Few companies celebrate the student guitars of their own past. Fender did, because in Japan those guitars were the past.

Two more signs followed. In 2020 Fender began working with Fujigen again, starting with a reissue of the HM Stratocaster, and later used that partnership for the JV Modified series. On 30 June 2023 it opened Fender Flagship Tokyo in Harajuku, the company's first flagship store anywhere, on four floors of a building called The Ice Cubes, with a custom-shop floor at the top and a made-in-Japan clothing label, F IS FOR FENDER, on the ground floor. The address is in Jingumae, the same district where ESP opened its first repair workshop in 1975.

Beyond Fender: Ibanez, ESP, Tokai

Fender is only one door into the Japanese guitar. Ibanez began in Nagoya in 1908 as the instrument department of a bookshop, Hoshino Shoten. In 1929 the business became Hoshino Gakki Ten and began importing Spanish guitars made by Salvador Ibáñez; by 1935 it was making its own stringed instruments in Nagoya. It founded a factory for electric guitars and amplifiers in 1962 and bought its American distributor, Elger, in Pennsylvania in 1972. That distributor was the defendant in the case of 1977.

ESP began as a repair shop. In February 1975 Hisatake Shibuya opened the Electric Sound Center in Jingumae, Tokyo, a workshop and shop in one, with a school for repairers in mind. Its own Navigator brand followed in 1976, a Tokyo factory in 1981, and a guitar-making academy in 1983. ESP made its name with careful replicas of American shapes, then with its own: its Explorer-style guitar became famous in the hands of James Hetfield of Metallica in the late 1980s. The ESP MX-250 James Hetfield model in black belongs to that line.

Tokai, the harmonica maker of 1947, is still in Hamamatsu, and briefly made some Fender Japan instruments for the Japanese market. Fujigen now builds under its own name, FGN, as well as for others. The documentary below is the factory's own film and tour.

This is the factory that built the first Fender Japan guitars, told in its own words. Watch for the balance of machine and hand: this was the factory that brought computer-controlled routers to guitar making in 1981.

See also: Japanese rangefinder cameras, the other precision craft that began by following a Western model.

Guitar Street and the vintage room

Every Japanese guitar story passes through Ochanomizu. The street in front of the station, in Kanda Surugadai in Tokyo, grew into a student quarter after Meiji University opened there in 1886. After the war the occupation forces sold many instruments into private hands, general shops began to stock them, and the electric-guitar craze of the 1960s and the folk music of the 1970s did the rest. In the 1990s the visual-kei bands brought a second wave of shops. Today there are more than forty instrument shops in a few streets, some for ukuleles, some only for vintage guitars. In 2023 a newspaper met two sisters there who had come to buy a guitar and a bass after watching Bocchi the Rock, the anime about a high-school girls' band.

In our reading, Japan became a natural home for the American vintage guitar too. Players who had grown up on JV Stratocasters went looking for the 1950s and 1960s originals behind them, and that is why the Japanese market keeps such careful records of serials, decals and finishes: it learned the original by building it.

Our Fender shelf holds both sides of that conversation, Japanese guitars and the American reissues and originals they answered. Our Tokyo team can also look for a specific model or year in Japan.

The other Japanese sound: hi-fi

The same decades that made the Japanese guitar made Japanese hi-fi. Luxman began in Osaka in 1925. Sansui was founded in Tokyo on 3 June 1947, and closed in 2014. Accuphase was founded on 1 June 1972 by Jiro Kasuga, first under the name Kensonic, and is still based in Yokohama. A guitar is only half the sound; the other half is the room it is played back in.

Our hi-fi pieces sit on the same shelf as the guitars, and our guide to Accuphase and Luxman covers them in more depth. Read together, the two crafts tell the same story: a Western invention, rebuilt in Japan with a patience that the original makers came to respect.

Japanese audio houses on our shelf
House	Founded	Home
Luxman	1925	Osaka; now Yokohama
Sansui	3 June 1947	Tokyo; closed 2014
Accuphase	1 June 1972, as Kensonic	Yokohama

See also: the voices of the shamisen, koto and shakuhachi, Japan's older strings.

Opinion: never a copy

This section is our opinion. The Japanese guitars of the 1970s did copy American shapes, and some copied logos. Gibson had every right to defend its headstock, and the people who designed the Stratocaster and the Les Paul deserve the credit for them. Anyone who says the lawsuit era was pure homage is ignoring the trademark question.

But a shape is not a guitar. A guitar is wood chosen, dried, cut and finished; frets dressed; a neck carved to a hand. Those skills were Japanese, learned over twenty years of building for others, and they were good enough that Fender chose to hire them rather than beat them. When the American factory closed in 1985, the Japanese one kept Fender alive. When Fender wanted to celebrate its vintage designs in 2017 and 2020, it went back to Japan to do it.

The fairest view on the other side is that Japanese makers began by borrowing and only later invented, and that the Ibanez and ESP originals came after the copies, not before. We agree with the order of events. We disagree with the verdict. In music, players learn by playing other people's songs. Japanese guitar makers learned the same way, and then wrote their own.

Where the record differs

The Japanese guitar story was told mostly by players and collectors, and some of its dates disagree. Where accounts differ, we print both.

Points where accounts disagree
Question	One account	Another account	What we print
When did the Ventures spark the boom?	A 1962 visit	The tour of January 1965	The 1965 tour as the spark; the band visited earlier
When did Dyna Gakki take over?	Parts from 1995, full contract 1996	1997	The mid-1990s
When did the Crafted in Japan decal begin?	1995	1997	The mid-1990s, varying by model
When was Fender sold by CBS?	1984	Announced 1 February 1985, formalised 12 March 1985	1985
How many shops line Guitar Street?	More than forty, per a 2023 newspaper report	As many as fifty, per the district tourism office	More than forty
When did Kanda Shokai's licence begin?	1982, at the founding	1997, per a 2015 Japanese report	Both; the venture was likely reorganised

Our reading

The Japanese electric guitar is a story about learning in public. It began with an American band and a Japanese boom, grew in a cowshed and a harmonica factory, and reached its turning point when an American company asked its imitators to become its makers. The JV Stratocasters of 1982 were built to stop the copies. They ended by becoming originals of their own, with their own serials, their own decals, their own signature models and their own collectors.

That is why we keep Japanese and American guitars on one shelf. They are not rivals in our reading, but two halves of the same craft, each of which kept the other going in a bad year. A Japanese Fender is not a lesser Fender. It is a Fender with a second hometown.

That is our reading.

Bridge line: Japanese instrument making is one strand of The New Japonisme, our manifesto for reading craft, technology and subculture as one culture, with a map of every room in the house.

Answered plainly

What is a JV Fender?

A guitar from the first two years of Fender Japan, 1982 to 1984, with a serial number beginning JV, for Japanese Vintage. The first were made at Fujigen in Matsumoto, and they are now widely collected.

What separates the MIJ and CIJ decals?

The decal marks the era and usually the factory: Made in Japan for the Fujigen years to the mid-1990s and again after 2007, Crafted in Japan for the Dyna Gakki years in between. It is not, by itself, a mark of better or worse quality.

Was Fender Japan the genuine article?

Yes. It was a licensed joint venture founded in 1982 with Fender as a partner, and in 1985 it supplied most of the new Fender guitars in the world while the American factory was being replaced.

What does "lawsuit era" mean?

A loose name for the Japanese copies of American guitars made from about the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. It refers to the Gibson case against the American distributor of Ibanez, filed in 1977 and settled in 1978.

Can you find a specific Japanese guitar for me?

Yes. Tell us the model, year or decal you want and our Tokyo team will look for it across Japan, with the serial and condition checked before anything is sent.

From Tokyo to your door

If there is a JV Stratocaster, a Japan-only signature model or a particular year you want that is not on our shelf, begin a private request and we will look for it in Japan. Or walk the Fender shelf, where every guitar carries its serial, its decal and its grade.

With care from Tokyo,
The Japonista Curation and Concierge Team

References

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