donniebrasco

On 16/06/2020 at 09:18, Bassassin said:

To be blunt, yes. I honestly have no idea why someone who claims to understand these instruments would say yours was made by Matsumoku. The only reason I can think of is that he is conflating the standalone Diamond brand with Aria Diamond, and then presuming that every Aria guitar was made by Matsumoku, which is demonstably not correct.

If you'll bear with me I'll try to explain - it's difficult to do without being longwinded so this might be both boring and overly detailed. Brevity is not my forte (that's probably a prog rock thing!) but I'll try to make sense. I should explain that while I might only be some nobody on a forum, I'm some nobody on a forum who's been playing MIJ instruments for 40+ years, studying them for much of that time, and for years made much of my living restoring and selling them. I have owned, played, worked on, assessed and sold multiple hundreds of these things and along the way picked up a bit of info.

My MIJ rule of thumb no.1 is, with a couple of exceptions, ignore the sticker on the end, if there is one. Most brand names have absolutely nothing to do with the manufacturer, and can be more often misleading rather than helpful. So, taking your bass as just a Japanese bass, I'll try to explain how I, and anyone else who knows these instruments, can tell that it's not a Matsumoku product. Many manufacturers had various individual traits which can make it straightforward to ID their instruments, or, like I said earlier, to be confident about what something definitely isn't!

First - the neckplate. On their 70s era copies Matsumoku used two styles of plate:

Both styles are exclusive to Matsumoku - a "Steel Adjustable" plate constitutes a 100% confirmed ID. The only Mats instruments that did not always use these styles were brands commissioned by specific distributors, for example Univox & SLM Electra, who specified their own logos and serialisation.

The plate on your bass, with its lower-half MIJ stamp is a standard style mostly associated with Fujigen Gakki but also used occasionally by several other manufacturers including Kasuga and Moridaira. Importantly, this style has never been seen on a Matsumoku instrument. If you read the quoted section in one of my earlier posts, that gives a bit of insight into how metal parts such as neckplates were sourced by various different builders.

I didn't talk about the serial on your bass earlier - as an aside, it's interesting (I have never seen that format or positioning before) but I think a red herring as far as a manufacturer ID is concerned. Looking at the irregularity of the characters compared to other serials, it appears to have been hand-stamped after the plate was manufactured.

The pickups on your bass help to exclude Matsumoku as manufacturer. On their J bass copies, Mats used a couple of distinct styles which are quite different to standard J units:

As the 70s copies were based on 60s & 70s Fenders, pickups were intended to be hidden under chrome covers, so authenticity wasn't considered that important. The earliest copies pre-date the existence of accurate J type pickups, so often manufacturers used whatever was available - it's  common to find chrome Telecaster-style units under the covers of budget basses.

Anyway, as time passed, the basses became more authentic & Matsumoku moved to using conventional J-type pickups, interchangeable with the original Fender units. The round-ended pickups like yours are common but broadly, not used by Matsumoku or Fujigen.

Identification of electronics & pickups remains one of the big grey areas in the MIJ community knowledge - Nisshin Onpa was responsible for Maxon pickups which were very widely used, and very helpful in dating pre-serial instruments as from 1971 they bear a code which defines the unit's actual day of manufacture. However there are various pickup styles, including most bass pickups, which aren't coded or branded, so beyond the overall style not much use for date or ID.

I need to explain how I know your bass is not early 70s. Simply, it's the headstock. Accurate MIJ copies of American designs started appearing around 1970 - bodies, headstocks, fretboards, the whole aesthetic, was intended to look as convincing as possible. It's entirely fair to say that no MIJ Fender copy made before mid-1977 would have a headstock like yours.

You'll have heard the term "lawsuit" bandied about in relation to these instruments. Leaving aside the fact there never was a lawsuit, the threatened legal action by Norlin, Gibson's then-parent company against Elger Hoshino, the US arm of Ibanez brand owner Hoshino Gakki Ten, was in relation to Hoshino's use of the trademarked "open book" shape on Ibanez-branded guitars. No lawsuit took place because Ibanez had stopped using that style over a year earlier, as the brand started moving away from copy instruments towards its own designs.

However a consequence of the stir caused by the legal threat was that it precipitated a general move away from copies, and other Japanese manufacturers followed suit, meaning most headstock shapes on exported instruments were modified from that point on. Matsumoku changed their Fender copies to this shape:

It's worth mentioning that Japanese home-market copies weren't modified, and while by 1979 MIJ copies in general had pretty much vanished from export ranges, they continued in their home market for decades.

As I said in my first post, I've never seen a bass the same as yours before, and while not getting a pat answer about its ID & manufacture might be frustrating, for the likes of me it's intensely fascinating. I think most of the MIJ intelligentsia elsewhere will probably conclude it's a Chushin - and they might be right - but I'm not sure. Chushin Gakki was a massive manufacturer which supplied an immense range of instruments of all levels with a countless number of brands - but their scale & significance is something that's only become obvious in the last 10 or so years. It's meant the name's become something of a catch-all for anything we can't be certain about, and realistically, that's a lot of stuff.

I'm skeptical broadly because there are lots of examples of confirmed Chushin Jazz copies which are the same standard as yours but have very different woodwork details. It makes no sense that the same factory would produce two different versions with the same appearance, spec and price point. This is part of the same logic that can be used to tentatively rule out other manufacturers whose instruments are well-recorded such as Fujigen, Moridaira, Kasuga.

I think your bass - and the related Cimars & CSLs - came from a specific factory whose traits we're as yet unsure about and whose role at the time isn't clear. The likes of Terada, Iida, Dyna, Kawai, Nagoya Suzuki & Kiso Suzuki were all active at the time and certainly on the copy bandwagon, along with numerous long-forgotten others, and of course Matsumoto Gakki Seizou Kumiai, the manufacturers' union mentioned in an earlier post, about which we still understand frustratingly little.

I've often compared understanding these instruments to a form of archaeology - there is little information about the hundreds of manufacturers that came and went during the Japanese guitar boom, a period that broadly spanned the late 50s to the late 80s, and the ones we know most about are those that were most successful at the time, and that survive today. Everything else is the result of years of piecing together scraps of what's left behind.

 

What an immensely great post and interesting reading @Bassassin !!!! It's such a pleasure to start this morning with a hot coffee and this reading, thanks a million!!!!

Hello guys, just bought one from a guy in Canada, I really would like to know more about this instrument, please reply to this post to let me know if any of you is still active on this, and I will post a few pics and share the info I have (not many, actually). Thanks a million