The Lab · Portland OR & Kobe JP · Est. 2009
A working repair bench in southeast Portland and a sourcing desk in Kobe — run by a luthier with twenty-two years on the tools, a Japan-based director, and an eighteen-thousand-entry serial archive no generalist dealer can match.
A short statement from the founder
I opened Japan Vintage Guitars in 2009 because I was tired of watching exceptional Japanese instruments from the 1960s and 1970s get relabelled, refretted, and quietly resold as something they were not. The guitars coming out of Greco, Tokai, Fernandes, Yamaha, and the smaller shops of Hamamatsu and Matsumoku were, in many cases, built to the same specifications and by the same hands as the American instruments they were inspired by — and they deserved to be sold on their own terms, with their own paperwork.
Sixteen years on, I still personally sign the dossier that ships with every guitar we list. That dossier records the serial number against our archive of more than eighteen thousand entries, lists every original component verified at our Portland bench, names the previous owner where it can be named, and notes any modification honestly. If a pickup has been changed, we say so. If a bridge has been replated, we say so. Documented originality does not mean "perfect" — it means you know exactly what you are buying, in writing, before you wire a single dollar.
Every instrument we sell is backed by a lifetime authenticity guarantee and a ten-thousand-dollar buy-back pledge. That is my signature, not a marketing line. If you visit the workshop by appointment, the bench is in the back room on Division Street. The coffee is decent. The guitars are better.
David Reinhart Founder · Portland, Oregon · Spring 2009
Two desks, one mission
Each instrument passes through both. One side hunts it; the other side proves it.
The physical bench. Every guitar lands here within eleven days of leaving Japan on average. Our two full-time luthiers — together holding twenty-two years of repair-bench experience, including a former repair position at Ishibashi Music in Tokyo — open the body, verify components against the serial archive, photograph the neck pocket, and document any modification in writing.
The intake desk. Our sourcing director works a direct pipeline that includes estate liquidations in Osaka, Hamamatsu, and Nagoya — relationships no generalist dealer maintains. Instruments are photographed, serial-logged, and consolidated for shipment before they ever touch a trans-Pacific flight. The provenance chain begins here, on paper, in Japanese.
The Provenance Process
Every guitar that reaches our inventory page has cleared each of the stages below. The dossier that ships with the instrument is the paper trail of those stages, in writing, signed by the founder.
Our sourcing director receives the instrument from one of more than sixty Japanese suppliers or estate contacts. Serial number, maker, approximate year, and any known ownership notes are logged against the archive before the guitar leaves the country of origin.
A luthier on our two-person bench opens the body cavity, photographs the neck pocket, the pot codes, the solder joints, and the routing. Hardware is weighed against period-correct reference specimens. Anything inconsistent is flagged for the dossier before the guitar is photographed for the inventory page.
The serial is matched against our archive of more than eighteen thousand Greco, Tokai, and Fernandes entries — the largest publicly documented database outside Japan. Pickups, bridges, tuners, and knobs are cross-referenced to the year and batch the serial implies. Discrepancies do not get listed; they get returned to source.
Wherever the chain can be reconstructed, we name it: original Japanese owner, importer, any American dealer of record, and each subsequent private owner we can document. Reverb, eBay, and direct-sale history are checked across our 2,180 verified transactions for prior listings.
The archive and the record
From the press file
“Reinhart's operation is the closest thing the Japanese-vintage market has to a reference library. Every guitar arrives with a dossier that reads less like a sales sheet and more like a museum object label — and that, increasingly, is the point.”
Vintage Guitar Magazine
Featured in Guitar Magazine (UK, 2021), the documentary "Made in Japan: The Sound of the F" (2023), and the Electric Japan retrospective at the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle (2022).
