Kanji stamp help needed
 

Hello and thanks for reading my post,



those are stamps from guitar manufacturer, in cavities of pickups.
In order to track Maya Musical Instrument CO and Chushin gakki
history and guitar models I need to know what these kanji mean.

Both red and black one. If I "translated" it correctly part of it says "Yamada",
which is probably surname of guitar inspector.

Any help is precious to me.

Thank you.

The red one says "3 [something]." I can't make it out because the ink has worn away.

The black stamp says:
INSPECTOR
Nov. 12, 1978 ("54" means "54th year of the Showa Emperor," which is 1978)
Yamada

三条?
Is it producer's first name?

Wait...
1978?
Umm, wouldn`t it be 1979?

I am astounded by speed and will to help me out!
Thank you so much, all of you.

I am in your debt.
Peace.

You're right. 1979.

I don't know this stuff by heart, so I used this chart: hanga gallery . . . torii gallery: Japanese Date Conversion

1. I'm a little disappointed I can't get the awesome "search engine" at wolframalpha.com to convert between Japanese and Gregorian calendars.

2. I misread the chart anyway. 1979 is correct, Nyororin.

I'll try to make better photograph of the red stamp.
Could it be that it says "third class" 三等?

I highly doubt it as red ink is almost exclusively used for name stamps.

You're probably right.
There is no way this high quality guitar is "third class" anyway.
Thank you for you time.

No chart needed if you can remember the magic number 25.　

昭和〇〇年　+　25 = 19〇〇年　

If it's a high quality guitar, there's probably a site somewhere listing the people who have been luthiers for the company. I know if you search for the guitar company's name in Wikipedia, you get one article for a guitar designer for the company.

Yes, I already searched extensively. There is very little info on the company as it was destroyed in Kobe earthquake. There are no detailed records but few catalog pages and "old" musicians who remember those guitars.Also Japanese masters used different coding that other builders, so it was hard to find clues on how to determine age of guitars.

I know who made it (Maya musical instrumen CO) , I just needed to find a way to help people determine age of these fine guitars. I imagine there is more info on Japanese forums but I cannot browse them as my knowledge of language is...well shameful.I read almost every page that mentions model of the guitar and company that built them.

You've all been very helpful and I am grateful for that.

Thanks! :rheart:

Here's another shot of the red stamp.
If anyone can read what it says, it would be great.
If not, you've already helped me.





Thanks again!

Well, I've already given you the date off the guitar. (And then I got corrected on the year immediately below that.)

Yes,you did. That's all I needed.
Other stuff is just a bonus for me.

I can't see the pictures right now, but I'll ask around. I've got a lot of friends who are really into guitars- some of whom are luthiers themselves.

By the way, Masaegu, that +25年 thing is genius! I cannot believe I never noticed that. That will come in serious handy.

Somewhere along the line they introduced that in high school... If I recall correctly, the 25 rule wasn`t just +25. It was also that 昭和 started in 1925 on 12/25.

I remember 大正 being +11, but can`t remember 明治.

For Meiji (1868 - 1912), it is not simple as it spans two centuries but it's basically + 67. The base year is 1800 rather than 1900.

Looking it up afterward, I realized that was probably the reason I couldn`t remember... Or that there had been no easy and convenient rule introduced for converting the years to begin with.

I think there were a few others used for other periods in history, but I can`t remember any of them now... Especially some of the earlier stuff, as my Japanese wasn`t all that good.

Honestly, this and the base-10,000 system are the only two things I wish would change about Japanese. And even then, the year one is only out of laziness. The numbering system, on the other hand....

Man, I'm really talented with math, and it's so frustrating to have to sit and think for 30+ seconds every time I want to say a number bigger than 100,000 out loud. :/

you get used to it, it took me a year and a half of mistakes and 30 second thinking but now I do the 3 group base to 4 group base and yen to dollars as fast as I used to do binary to decimal to hex back in university

I do it the same as everything else - without converting in my head.
If you think of a number in English and then try to switch it over (Just like if you think of a word and then try to switch it over) it won`t work well.

I do have to pause for a second when hitting things over 億... But I think that`s more because the number itself is so big and I rarely use it in normal life.

It`s kind of strange because 100万 and a million are the same thing... But they exist as separate entities in my mind.

I guess it's because I'm such a numbers guy: undergrad degree was in abstract math.

It's my one major linguistic flaw. I don't know why. I guess because numerical symbols and base systems are just so inextricably linked to words in my head—I was doing two-digit multiplication in first grade (thanks, Dad!), so maybe it's that long history of connecting sounds with symbols.

If they're written in Japanese with kanji, I've got no problems. But when I see 1.000.000 I think "OK, 10.000 is man, so 100.000 is juuman, so 1.000.000 is hyakuman!" and finally I can vocalize it.

Then again, maybe it's because I rarely have had to say anything greater than a few hundred in Japanese ever. I really should make a program that generates flashcards of Japanese numbers and see if I can train to say them fast.

This isn`t quite as bad as you think... Well, for 1,000,000 it is, but for larger numbers it seems quite normal for people to sort of count backward before saying the number. When checking numbers, it seems like everyone (at least around me) will do a sort of whispered 千、万、十万、百万 and so on under their breath before actually reading the number.

I wonder if it's because Japanese notates with . base-1000 but notes with kanji base-10000.

In other words, you put a . every three digits, but a new kanji comes into play every four.

1.000 man = 1.000 x 10.000 = 100.000.000
So in one, it's a "thousand" or something, but the other it's a "hundred" of something.

What I mean is that every three digits you have a dot, but every four digits you'd have man, oku, chou, etc.

Whereas in many western languages, you have them in harmony. Every three digits is a ., and every three digits you introduce thousand, million, billion, trillion, etc.

I think people struggle in English only past 100 billion, and that's only because almost never do you even have to use the word "trillion."