Made in Japan or Crafted in Japan: the wording is the answer

One of two phrases is printed beside the serial on a Japanese-made Fender headstock, and which one it is decides which span the number belongs to. Nothing in the digits says which. If you arrived here from a question the decoder asked, that is the question.

Where the wording is

Turn the instrument over. On a Japanese-made Fender the number is on the back of the headstock, and one of two phrases is printed or stamped alongside it, above the serial or beside it: Made in Japan, or Crafted in Japan. Read it under a light before you answer, because the digits by themselves can't tell you which phrase was on the headstock.

What each answer changes

There are three answers, and each does something different to the reading.

Made in Japan or Crafted in Japan keeps the spans carrying that wording and rules the rest out. On five of the six letters that leaves exactly one, and the reading stops being a candidate set: the answer names the span, shows its opening year, and states probable confidence. The note beside the confidence level spells the span out, because the digits still don't pick a year inside it. On T the same answer can leave two, which is what the section below is about.

Neither, or no wording at all withdraws the reading entirely. The serial goes back through the rest of our Fender records, and for five of the six letters there is nothing else there to match, so the answer is that nothing in our data matches the number. The sixth is A: an A and six digits is also the shape Fender used on amplifier serials, so that one comes back as an amplifier instead, and the tube chart is what dates it.

The 1997 wording change

Crafted in Japan replaced Made in Japan on the decal in 1997, and the serial letters did not restart when it did. That is the whole of the problem. A, O, P, Q and S were each in use before the change and again after it, and T sits across the point where the wording went back the other way, and takes a third span besides. Six letters, thirteen spans, one number shape.

Two letters escape it. JV (1982 to 1984) and SQ (1983 to 1984) belong to the opening years of Japanese production and were never reused, so the decoder doesn't ask the wording question for either of them.

All of them are charted one by one on the Japan era page, which is where to go for the years themselves.

The letter the question can't finish

T needs a second look, because it is the one letter where answering the question doesn't leave you with a single span. Fender charts three runs against it: Made in Japan from 1994 to 1995, Crafted in Japan from 2007 to 2008, and Made in Japan again from 2007 to 2010.

So Crafted in Japan is decisive here and Made in Japan is not. Answer Crafted in Japan and one span is left. Answer Made in Japan and the decoder shows both, more than a decade apart. What separates a mid-nineties instrument from a late-two-thousands one is its hardware, its finish and the date on the neck heel, and none of that is in the number.

On the other five letters the Made in Japan reading is the earlier of the two, and the question settles the reading outright.

When the question is not about Japan

One letter raises a different question. An S followed by six digits, where the first of those six is 6, 7, 8 or 9, is also the shape of a United States Fender made between 1976 and 1981. There the wording question is whether the headstock carries any country marking at all, because a US instrument of that run usually carries none. Answer that it carries no marking, or Made in U.S.A., and the reading is the American one; answer Made in Japan and it's the Japanese one. Say Crafted in Japan and the serial goes to the separate Japanese S reading, which has two spans of its own to pick between.

What the wording doesn't settle

It gives you a span. Fender says plainly that its own early Japanese records are incomplete, and every one of these thirteen readings carries its span: where the wording narrows to a single one, the answer states probable confidence rather than certainty.

The country is the only fact every Japanese format in our Fender table carries beyond the year. No plant, no factory town, no supplier. Anything more specific than the country is coming from somewhere other than the serial number.